


You Pull Me Under (Just to Save Yourself)

by QuoteIntangible



Series: Dark!Ryan Series [1]
Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Domestic Violence, Dubious Consent, Flashbacks, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Medical Descriptions, Nothing as Graphic as Take It Out on Me, PTSD, Panic Attacks, Possible medical inaccuracies, Smut, Very brief references to past suicide attempts both unintentional and intentional
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-05-07 10:56:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 42,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5454125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuoteIntangible/pseuds/QuoteIntangible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The companion piece to Take It Out on Me that has taken on a life of it's own, told mostly from Spencer's POV, but with appearances by others. Title from Coming Down by Five Finger Death Punch</p><p>"Spencer,” he says, clutching his phone tightly in his shaking hands, leaving a smear of blood across the screen. “I need you to take me to the hospital.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I don't know any of these people, never met any of them, and none of this is even remotely true.

Brendon hates  _Mad as Rabbits_ the way Ryan wrote it. The lyrics were, of course, fine, but the song just needed a little bit more flare to make it interesting, and less like it came directly from a Beach Boys and Beatles collaboration CD. He thinks adding an intro with a heavy drum part and maybe some horns might help bring the song into this century, and sprucing up Spencer’s drumline would make it infinitely better. He didn’t like the bass line either, it was far too retro, so he wrote a new one.

Heart pounding, he approaches Ryan at the studio, figured his…Ryan would be less likely to hit him there surrounded by all those people, and he’d cool down before they got home.

He's wrong. So, so wrong.

Ryan calls a break, then grabs his arm, each one of his long fingers digging into already bruised and tender flesh. He drags Brendon into a storage room, locking the door behind him, and letting go of Brendon just long enough to take his belt off.

Brendon flinches, backs himself into a corner, heart pounding faster than he thought possible before, and legs starting to feel weak and tingly. His hands hover near his face, but he knows it won't make a difference even if Ryan tries to hit him there.

He winces when Ryan grabs him again, and forces him to bend over the back of a chair.

He grips the seat tightly when the first lash falls, biting his lip to keep the gasp in. Ryan never did like it when he showed weakness.

“Are you trying to make a fool out of me?” Ryan hisses, the belt striking across his shoulders. “Think it’s funny to embarrass me at work?”

“No, no, I just…” he cuts off, biting his lip again when the belt lands once more with a solid _thwack_ across his shoulders. “I just want this album to be the best it can be.”

“And you think I can’t do that on my own?” Ryan asks, the belt landing on his lower back in three, quick, stinging successions.

“I just want to help,” Brendon says, squeezing his eyes shut as the belt comes down again, striking across his spine. He gasps, unable to hold it in this time, and hears Ryan scoff. The belt hits the floor with a clink of metal.

Brendon breathes a sigh of relief. _At least I got to keep my shirt on this time,_ he thinks.

He tries to stand, but Ryan pushes him back over the chair. Ryan can’t think…he wouldn’t. Not here. Except he hears Ryan’s zipper, and knows that’s exactly what Ryan is planning.

“If you want those changes, you’re going to have to earn them,” Ryan says.

He feels his heart leap to his throat, and tries to swallow the rising bile that comes with it.

Knowing what Ryan wants, he hands him the lube and pre-lubed condom he always keeps with him for when this happens. He prays to a God he doesn’t believe exists that Ryan will at least use one of them.

He tries not to jerk when Ryan shoves three lubed up fingers inside of him at once. It _hurts,_ but it's going to hurt a whole lot more if he can’t relax before Ryan lines himself up and shoves something much bigger inside of him.

He’s not ready when Ryan takes him, relentless, hips pounding against his ass, making the chair dig into his stomach. He’ll have a bruise there, too. Another to add to his growing collection.

He doesn’t bother touching his own dick. He’s not going to get off on this.

Returning to the studio, Brendon hides the limp the best he can.

Jon smirks. “I know what you two were doing,” he says with a mocking sing-song voice and a wink.

Brendon grimaces, thinks, _if you knew what he was doing, why didn’t you stop him?_

He sits gingerly on his piano bench, while Ryan and Jon discuss the changes _Brendon_ suggested with their producer, hears Ryan say, “Brendon really wants to play bass on this one.”

This too, is Ryan punishing him. But he likes playing bass. He really doesn’t mind.

“Are you okay?”

He jumps, wincing when his ass hits the bench again. Spencer places a hand on his shoulder, and the touch is light, meant to be comforting. But the weight and calluses of Spencer’s hand irritate the still stinging welts on his back. He resists the urge to brush Spencer’s hand off.

“I’m fine,” he says, trying to dig a smile out from someplace within him that hasn’t been damaged by Ryan or doesn’t hurt.

He can’t find any.

Spencer looks unconvinced, but he thankfully lets go of Brendon’s shoulder, and sits down next to him on the bench instead. Brendon scoots over to make room.

“Okay, but if things aren’t okay, you know you can talk to me about anything,” he says, knocking their shoulders together. “I know Ryan can be an asshole.”

He finds that smile for Spencer. He always could make Brendon feel better.

Brendon wonders how different his life would be if he had kissed Spencer that day instead of Ryan. Would Spencer have turned him down, sending him into Ryan’s arms anyways? Or would Spencer have kissed him back, been a little more gentle his first time? Would they still be dating?

Would Brendon be so afraid of…

No. He’s still in love with Spencer, not Ryan.

Wait. Stupid brain. He definitely meant to say that the other way around.

Right?

Ryan follows him home after studio, though he was kind of looking forward to having a night off.

Ryan forces…guides him to his bed. Brendon thinks, _he’s not really expecting me to have sex with him again, is he?_

He wonders if he can convince Ryan to settle for a blowjob, forces himself not to flinch when Ryan glares at the suggestion. Settling on his stomach, he lets Ryan do what he wants, and hopes he can endure.

He doesn’t touch his own dick this time either. He’s not even remotely turned on, and it comes to him like a flare hitting him in the face. _I’m not in love with him anymore,_ he realizes as Ryan pushes into him. He buries his face into his pillow, pulls up the sides to cover his face and ears.  It doesn’t block out the sound of Ryan’s moans, nor does it completely cover the sob that’s wrenched from him.

“Really, you pussy?” Ryan says. He doesn’t ask Brendon what’s wrong, and doesn’t stop thrusting until he comes in Brendon’s ass without a condom on, even though he knows Brendon hates that.

He’s not in love with Ryan anymore.

But he’s too afraid to do anything about it. 

The next year with Ryan is Hell.

There’s something wrong with Ryan.

Brendon sees it in the way Ryan treats sex, uses it as a method to control him. Underneath the weird clothes and the sarcasm and sass is a monster.

He still believes he can save Ryan, exorcise the monster hiding under his skin…but now he’s too terrified of it to do anything more than cower in fear and submit.

So he lets Ryan take his anger out on him, lets Ryan use him, abuse him until he’s torn off Brendon’s flesh, left scars on his insides that no one else can see, scars Brendon fears might never heal.

He starts lying to himself, every time he goes back, telling himself that one day Ryan will get better. One day he will be free.

But then Ryan goes too far, holds him down, though Brendon’s not fighting, and lays lash upon lash across his back until Brendon _is_ fighting not to scream. He can see it in his eyes that Ryan’s not really there. It happens sometimes.

He wonders how long until Ryan accidentally kills him during one of his rages.

When Ryan comes back from whatever memory is haunting him, Brendon thinks Ryan’ll be better, he’ll stop hitting him.

Brendon doesn’t know where he gets the courage to tell Ryan no when he does come back from wherever his mind led him.

It’s a stupid decision.

Ryan’s digging his thumbs into the joint of his jaw, waving his dick in Brendon’s face, expecting him to just take it.

He doesn’t want this, but he’s not going to fight it again. He doesn’t know how to anymore.

Spencer saves him; Spencer who’s always been there for him. Even though he didn’t know how bad things were with Ryan, Spencer always knew when Brendon needed cheering up and how to do it. Spencer gave him the strength he needed to face one more day.

“You can’t go back,” Spencer says, stone faced, shaking hand clamped down on his shoulder, digging into fresh welts. He winces, and Spencer’s eyes widen, hand loosening its tight grip, but remaining on his shoulder.

“I know,” he says. Ryan’s getting worse, getting meaner, depending more on drugs and less on sleep, human interaction and food and water to get him through the day. “But—”

“You can’t go back,” Spencer reiterates, handing tightening its grip again. “You can’t risk your happiness, your health, and your safety for him. There’s nothing there worth saving, Brendon. Let him go.”

Spencer wouldn’t say that about someone he’s known since he was five without good reason. He’s cynical, but not about the people he cares about.

“He hurt you, too” Brendon says, darting his eyes to look towards Spencer, who nods in confirmation.

“The first time we had sex, it hurt, a lot. So I asked him to stop, and he wouldn’t. He…yeah,” Spencer trails off, makes some sort of vague gesture towards the door. “I couldn’t be his friend anymore. I didn’t even want to be in the band, was gonna leave, but you joined at what was going to be my last practice, and I stayed because of you.”

He doesn’t understand what Spencer is trying to tell him, so he licks his lips, says, “You said the first time. When did you sleep with him again?” _And why,_  he thinks.

“Earlier today, before the concert,” Spencer says, hunching his shoulders, and turning his head away from Brendon. “He promised not to hurt you anymore if I slept with him.”

It hits him then, what Spencer is trying to say.

Spencer did that for him, because he loves him. Maybe Brendon doesn't understand what love is anymore, but maybe, just maybe, he's not as alone as he thought.

“I don’t want to go back,” he says, fresh tears chasing the trails of those shed earlier. “But Ryan will never let me go.” He’s terrified of what will happen if he tries to leave, because even the consequences of just saying no are more than he can handle. And the tiny part of him that still cares about Ryan, wonders what will happen if he leaves.

“You’re not alone. I’ll be there with you, and you know Zack won’t let him hurt you again if you just ask.”

“But what if I leave, and Ryan falls apart?” _What if the band breaks up? What if I’m left with nothing because of it?_

“Ryan’s not your problem. You have to take care of yourself. You don’t deserve this, Brendon. And…and you’ll still have me no matter what.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, wiping at the tears on his face. “I won’t go back.” Brendon always keeps his promises to Spencer. But if Ryan hunts him down, he’s not so sure he can tell him no.

He won’t go back on his own, trusts Spencer and Zack to keep an eye out for him, but he sees the way Ryan falls apart as the tour carries on, falls deeper into the embrace of drugs until he’s barely sober, even on stage. He would have killed Brendon if he ever did the same.

Spencer tells him what Ryan does to himself isn’t Brendon’s problem, but the part of him that sees the good in every one wonders what happened to make him this way. There must be something he can do, something to save Ryan, and to keep someone else from falling victim to him.

“Something bad happened to him, Spencer,” Brendon says. It’s the one universal truth he’s known since the day he kissed Ryan for the first time. Yeah, he’s still a little petrified of Ryan, and he knows he’s heading towards a beating.

But the band is falling apart. This is the end of Panic and everyone sees it. This is his last chance to talk some reason into him, to make Ryan see the light before he’s cut out of their lives for good.

So he goes to Ryan’s house to try and talk to him. If Ryan asks him to sleep with him, he’ll say no. He will. He’ll fight back.

Never, not even in Spencer’s wildest nightmares, did he ever think Ryan could hurt him like he did.

He always believed Ryan would stop before it got too far, until…until he doesn’t.

“Spencer,” he says, clutching his phone tightly in his shaking hands, leaving a smear of blood across the screen. “I need you to take me to the hospital.”

*

It’s fans that clue him in about the abuse. Before he remained blissfully ignorant of what was going on right underneath his nose.

Some friend he was.

“Did you see the bruises on Brendon’s arms?” he overhears a teenage girl with shoulder length blonde hair say at a meet and greet. He’s the only one on this side of the room for some reason with a security guard whose name he doesn’t know. The girl in question is set back a little from the crowd, leaning close to another teenage girl with dyed purple hair, but not so far away that Spencer can’t hear them.

“Yeah, did you see when his shirt rose up? There were more on his hips. I got a picture of it. I’m gonna post it to the livejournal community,” the girl with purple hair says, pulling out here phone.

“Do you really think it’s Ryan?” the first girl asks.

 _They can’t know that,_ Spencer thinks, his heart speeding up. It’s just a crazy fan theory, like the one that says he and Jon are meant for each other.

But…

Brendon has been acting rather odd, and not just lately, for more than a year now. At some point, Brendon stopped looking at Ryan like he was the greatest thing in the universe. That, too, was not a recent development, and he knew how cruel Ryan could be.

He looks up sharply across the room to where Ryan is standing, Brendon sticking close to his side. He sees the almost unnoticeable flinch when Ryan reaches past Brendon to grab a CD from a fan.

His feet carry him to the two teenage girls before his brain is consciously aware of it. “Show me the picture,” he says. “The one you were just talking about.”

The purple haired girl’s eyes are wide, but she promptly flips her phone around so he can see. He snatches it from her hand to get a closer look.

The photo is somewhat grainy, but the quality is good enough to make out the bruises. They look like fingers, like something he’s seen on his own hips after Ryan hurt him.

“Why do you think Ryan did this?” he asks, handing the startled girl back her phone.

“It’s obvious they’re boyfriends,” the blonde girl says.

“And Brendon is always covered in bruises. There’s an entire livejournal page dedicated to it. Some fans think he’s got a pain kink, and is into BDSM and stuff,” the purple haired girl clarifies, as if she is forgetting who she is talking to, or maybe seeking denial of the theory from a credible source. “But we think, and a lot of others think, Ryan is hurting him. Is he?” she asks, leaning in close.

"What makes you chose that theory over the first one?" he asks.

"Look at him," the blonde girl says, pulling a picture up from on her own phone. It's two pictures side by side, one from before they were famous of Ryan and Brendon joking around, both with smiles on his face. He doesn't know when the second picture was taken, but judging from Brendon's haircut, it's more recent. Ryan has his hand wrapped around Brendon's wrist, dragging the smaller man behind him. The the look on Brendon's face is hesitant, and he appears close to tears. "He used to be happy," the girl says. 

“I have to go,” he says, booking it from the room before security has a chance to stop him.

Later, while he’s alone in his hotel room, Jon hogging the shower, he googles ‘Brendon bruises abuse and livejournal.’ He risks wading into fan territory to find the page the girl talked about. He locates it relatively quickly, and starts browsing the posts with pictures from fans of concerts, meet and greets, interviews and other public appearances. Though the quality of pictures vary from blurry and shitty to professional quality, he can see finger-shaped bruises on Brendon’s wrists, arms, hips and around his neck in almost all of them.

The posts date back over _two_ years.

He wonders how he could live in Brendon’s pocket nearly that entire time, and not notice something like this. He thinks, maybe, he just didn’t want to.

“Are Brendon and Ryan…” he asks Jon when Jon emerges from the shower, towel throw around his hips and torso exposed. Brendon used to waltz out of hotel bathrooms naked as the day he was born. Spencer can’t remember the last time he roomed with Brendon, let alone seen him do that. Maybe avoiding Brendon because of his not so tiny crush, is coming back to bite him in the ass.

“Sleeping together?” Jon supplies when Spencer trails off. “Yeah. Have been for awhile. I thought you knew.”

 _Shit,_ he thinks. _Shit motherfucking son of a bitch on a stick._ “Is Ryan hitting Brendon?”

“I don’t know,” Jon shrugs. “I thought it was just some sort of kinky thing between them.” 

 _It’s not,_ his mind screams.

“Wait, you think,” Jon says, but he’s up and running to the one person who might know, who’s paid to notice these kinds of things.

“Zack,” he yells, pounding frantically on his hotel door. “Zack, fucking open up already.”

“Jesus, fuck, Spencer. What happened?”

“Is Ryan hitting Brendon?”

There is no reply from Zack. Not even a twitch of his facial muscles. That’s a yes from him if Spencer’s ever seen one. “Shit,” he says, grabbing onto the doorframe for balance when his legs start to feel weak. “How long?” he asks. Zack remains silent. Spencer can feel the desperation rising in him, like someone lit a fuse and there’s mere seconds before the bomb goes off. “How long!”

“I’m not 100 percent sure that Ryan is…But I noticed certain  _things_ a little over a year ago. If Ryan is.. it’s been going on longer than that. Brendon's just, he's not happy anymore.”

“And you didn’t, like, try to do something about it?”

“I tried. Brendon wasn’t ready to listen.”

The bomb in his chest explodes. “That’s bullshit,” he says, and storms away.

Still, Spencer waits until he has proof before he confronts either of them. Now that the seed of doubt is there, though, it’s impossible not to notice the evidence.

The way Brendon walks into sound check, trying to hide a limp, sitting stiffly at his piano bench, lips pressed tightly together.

Or the ring of purple, black and sickly yellow around his neck that his collar doesn’t quite hide one day.

The proof is there in the way Brendon never contradicts Ryan, gives in to every little thing he says, like he’s afraid of the repercussions if he doesn’t support Ryan.

Spencer will admit, he’s a little afraid to confront Ryan himself, so he tries to get Brendon to see reason first.

He barges behind the partition while Brendon is changing alone. There are welts (what the fuck?) on Brendon’s back. It’s worse than Spencer thought. This goes so far beyond Ryan losing his temper and hitting Brendon every once in a while.

“Shit, Brendon,” he says, crowding him in as Brendon covers his chest with his shirt. “Did Ryan do that to you?” His tone leaves no room for argument, and he regrets it the moment fear flashes across Brendon’s face, who stutters out a ‘Yes’ in reply, like _Spencer_ might hit him if he doesn’t answer truthfully.

“Did you want him to?” he asks, softening his voice and taking a tiny step back so he’s not looming over him.

Brendon shakes his head no, eyes staring at the partition like he can see right through it.

He’s about to tell Brendon that he has to leave Ryan when, speak of the devil, Ryan peeks his head past the partition, asking if Brendon is done. Ryan seems oddly satisfied when he realizes Spencer noticed the bruises.

Spencer keeps trying. Every moment he gets alone with Brendon, he impresses upon the fact that Brendon deserves better, or that he’s worth more than this, or that his safety is more important than the band, if that is what Brendon is worried about.

None of his tactics work.

He’s forced to resort to the one tactic he never wanted to do: Try and reason with Ryan.

Spencer is not afraid to admit that a tiny part of him is terrified of Ryan. Okay, maybe most of him is.

Ryan is deranged, he’s not right in the head, and he’s not afraid to use people to get what he wants.

The rules everyone plays by, don’t exist in Ryan’s world. Spencer might as well be your regular average Joe going up against a supervillain. Average Joes don’t win.

Not in real life.

But, he does it for Brendon.

Because Brendon, despite possibly two years of abuse, still looks at the world and sees all the good that’s left.

He won’t let Ryan take that away from him.

It makes him sick, what Ryan suggests, because Ryan clearly couldn’t give two shits about Brendon, and Ryan still loves Spencer, which is…not okay.

Sex with Ryan is the most repulsive thing Spencer can think of. He’d rather eat worms, or a cow’s dick.

Anything, but this.

He agrees for Brendon, because clearly no one else is going to help him, not even Zack. Spencer would do anything to save him from going through what he did, if it isn’t already too late for that.

Unlike his first – and only – time, Ryan is gentle. His body responds the way Ryan wants it to, but his mind screams _stop,_ and his stomach churns.

When it’s finally over, all he can think about is getting out of there as quickly as possible to avoid puking his guts up. When he snaps, tells Ryan ‘I stopped loving you a long time ago,’ he doesn’t think of the consequences for Brendon.

It occurs to him later, after the concert and after they’ve resettled into their hotel rooms. The second he realizes what he said and how Ryan is likely to react, he’s running back to Brendon’s hotel room, completely ignoring Jon (but he’s not mad at him, he swears).

Brendon is on his knees already, torso exposed and covered in welts, Ryan’s thumbs holding his mouth open.

He gets a brief glimpse of Brendon’s eyes screaming _help_ and _I don’t want this,_ body posture relaxed in resignation, before he’s yelling at Ryan, feet moving towards Brendon.

“No more,” he says to Brendon, because he’s not going to watch Brendon destroy himself anymore. “No more, or it’s over,” he says to Ryan, because he is not letting Ryan do this. 

It's in this moment Spencer knows it already over, though. Panic is dead, and he's the first to realize. 

The talk after with Brendon goes better than expected. Spencer thinks he finally found the right words when Brendon agrees to let go of Ryan, or maybe Brendon just needed to feel like someone was on his side to finally leave.

It’s his fault, he knows. Maybe if he hadn’t avoided Brendon for so long, and instead showed him Spencer was there for him, some of this could have been avoided.

He never intended to tell Brendon he loved him. It’s expected when he doesn’t get a reply.

The next day he hunts down Zack, because Panic may be over, but they at least need to finish their last tour, and he needs their security guard on his side to keep Brendon safe. “Zack I need to talk to you,” he says.

“What’s up, Spence?”

“I know you have these things all planned out ahead of time,” Spencer tells him, his voice breaking for some odd reason that he can’t seem to control right now, “but Brendon can’t room with Ryan anymore.”

“Good,” is Zack’s gruff answer. “I’ll work something out,” he adds. Spencer tries to flee, but Zack grabs his elbow and holds on gently. “Can _you_ share a room with him?” Zack asks.

Spencer’s never told anyone, except Brendon, about what Ryan did to him when they were teenagers.

But Zack’s asking him right now, for the first time ever, if Ryan ever hurt him. He’s been trying to hold himself together for so long now that he just can’t anymore.

He can’t.

He manages to choke out a “No” before his throat tightens, and there is a salty wetness assaulting his face. Even if he can’t talk about it, someone else _knows_ now, knows what Ryan really is, and is on his side. What Ryan made him do yesterday is still crawling across his skin, like he’s covered in scorpions that won’t wash away no matter how much he scrubbed his skin in the shower. He doesn’t want to cry like this out in the open, and in front of Zack who is a mass of solid emotionless man, but now that’s he started, he couldn’t stop even if he wanted to.

Zack guides him into a dark corner away from the hustle and bustle of techs that are starting to take notice, hand still resting on Spencer’s shoulder. He doesn’t say anything, just lets Spencer cry, shielding his tears from any curious onlookers with his body.

“I’m sorry,” he finally manages to say, wiping at his face with the sleeve of Jon’s hoodie (which he’s not giving back, because yeah, maybe he is still mad).

“It’s not your fault,” Zack says, loosening his grip to pat Spencer on the shoulder instead before pulling away.

That is the first time anyone has ever said that to him. He’s always known it, but it’s liberating to have reassurance.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“I’ve been dealing with this for a long time,” he says, shrugging off Zack’s worry. “I’ll be fine.”

“Will Brendon be okay?”

He remembers Brendon’s resignation from the night before, how he looked up at Ryan and just accepted what was being forced on him like it was normal, didn’t even try to and fight back. And how he still had to be convinced to leave Ryan.

“I think if Ryan walks up to him right now, says bend over and take it, he’s not going to say no,” Spencer answers truthfully. “He’s terrified, and I think he’s worried about what’s going to happen to the band.”

“The band is—”

“I know,” Spencer says, cutting him off. He can’t hear it said out loud just yet.

“I’ll talk to him again,” Zack says. “Let him know I’ll protect him from Ryan if he needs me to. But I think you need to show him how much you love him for Brendon to really understand what’s happened to him.”

“I don’t think now is a good time,” he says.

“I think it’s exactly what Brendon needs most right now.”

Spencer ignores the advice. Brendon doesn't need Spencer fawning all over him at a time like this. 

Brendon clings to him like Spencer is the only thing holding him together. But Brendon never brings up on his own that Spencer admitted to being in love with him, and he starts avoiding touching everyone, including Spencer, like he might contract anthrax if he does. 

It messes with Spencer's head. 

So, when Brendon comes to him, says “I want to go talk to Ryan. Something bad happened to him, Spencer. He deserves the chance to get better.” Spencer thinks he chock full of crazy sauce, but he doesn't argue. This just might be the dumbest idea Brendon’s ever had, but he understands Brendon needs space right now. Plus, Spencer doesn’t want to be the one to crush Brendon’s belief that there’s good in everyone.

Maybe that would have been better.

He doesn’t stop Brendon, and doesn’t go with him.

It’s is the biggest regret of his life.

“Spencer,” the urgency in Brendon’s voice instantly rouses Spencer from his sleep. “I need you to take me to hospital.” He’s alert, dressed and starting the car before he even knows where he’s going.

“Where are you?” he asks, but Brendon just keeps babbling ‘I’m sorry,’ over and over again, voice thick and heavy. “Brendon, where are you?” he asks more forcefully, trying to cut through the babble, and snap Brendon out of it.

“Ryan’s front yard,” he says. “I stole a towel. Spencer there’s…there's blood. I’m bleeding. A lot.”

The progression of thought doesn’t make sense, but before he can ask anything else, the line goes dead. He contemplates calling an ambulance, but Spencer doesn’t want to cause that kind of scene, doesn’t want to do that to Brendon.

He just hopes Brendon can hold on until he gets there, and prays he’s not making another mistake.

He doesn’t see the blood at first. It’s only after he settles Brendon in his passenger seat on the towel at Brendon’s insistence, that he sees it and realizes what Ryan took from him. He swallows the bile, places Brendon’s obviously broken arm in his lap, buckles in him, and then tears out of Ryan’s front lawn like the grim reaper is chasing them.

During the far too long drive, Brendon won’t stop apologizing. "I'm sorry," he says. "I'm so sorry. I'm sorry, Spencer."

Spencer drives with one hand on his shoulder, telling him it’s not his fault every time he does.

Settling in a chair in the ER, after the nurses take Brendon from him, he buries his face in his hands, and makes a mental list of everything that needs to be done right now to keep himself from crying.

He’s Brendon’s proxy, so there is no need to get his family involved in this. They’ll make up some sort of lie to tell them.

But Pete needs to know. This is the definitive end of Panic! as the world knows it, and Spencer really just needs a friend to talk to right now.

“You better have a good reason for calling me at midnight,” Pete grumbles in the phone, though he doesn’t sound groggy. “Just kidding. I was still wide awake. What's up, Spence?”

Spencer tries to form words, he really does, but all that comes out is a sob, his defenses shattering in the face of a friend.

“Jesus fuck, Spencer, what’s wrong?”  

Pete’s propensity to swear like a sailor in ever available situation calms him enough that he’s able to choke out, “I’m at the hospital. With Brendon.”

“Is he okay?” Pete interrupts, and God, Spencer loves Pete and his loyalty to his friends. He really needs that right now. “Spence, is he okay?” he repeats more forcefully when Spencer takes too long to answer.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “Ryan beat and raped him,” he says before he’s even really aware what he’s admitting. But he trusts Pete not to let this get to the papers or to tell anyone else, and he needs Pete to know the whole truth. “His arm’s broken and…there was blood everywhere, Pete. It was…it was horrible.”

“Jesus,” Pete swears into the phone. “Is this like…I don’t…”

Pete may not know what he is trying to say, but Spencer understands. “This didn’t just happen,” Spencer says, and tells him everything that he managed to drag out of a reluctant Brendon over the past few months.  

“I’m gonna kill that fucker. I’m gonna shank him with a rusty spoon. I swear.”

“Just,” Spencer says, and doesn’t know how to end that. Is there an appropriate punishment? And are they really the ones that are supposed to give it? “Just don’t.”

“Fuck, okay,” Pete concedes. “I’m sending you Patrick and Zack.”

“Wait, don’t,” he says. Bringing Patrick and Zack to the hospital means telling them everything that happened, and Spencer’s not willing to expose Brendon like that to anyone else.

“You shouldn’t be alone right now,” Pete argues. “And those two will find out the truth eventually. This isn’t something we can hide from them.”

He’s right. Pete couldn’t keep a secret from Patrick to save his life, and he’ll tell the lead singer of his band sooner or later. And Zack, well, Zack has his ways. He _always_ knows.

“If the press get ahold of this, the label will take care of it, okay? Don’t worry about anything else, just take care of our boy.”

*

“Patrick, I need you to go to the hospital,” Pete’s voice, which Patrick recognizes from the last time Pete said similar words to him, filters through his phone before Patrick can even say ‘hello.’

“Oh God, how many pills did you take? Do you know what they were? No, forget that. I’m hanging up and calling an ambulance, but I will call right back and you better fucking answer. I’ll be wherever you are as soon as I can,” Patrick says, rushing towards the entrance to his home studio.

“Patrick!” Peter interrupts. “Calm down. I appreciate the concern, and God do I love you right now, but I’m fine. I didn’t take anything, I swear. It’s…it’s Brendon. Spence just took him to the hospital.”

“Okay?” Patrick says, feeling the cold fingers of dread clench around his stomach. Pete would not be asking him to go to the hospital if Brendon just fell and broke a bone or was in a car accident. He remembers Brendon’s odd behavior the last time he saw him, and Patrick's suspicions on why. So it’s not too much of a surprise when Pete says, “Ryan beat the shit out of him.” However, it is a shock that breaks his heart what Pete says next. “He raped Brendon too.”

“Oh God,” Patrick says, leaning against the doorframe so he legs don’t give out on him. “How long has Ryan been abusing him?”

“How did you…?” Pete starts and then sighs into the phone. “Brendon told Spencer the first time Ryan hit him was the day he got knocked out by that bottle at Reading Festival in 06.”

“Two years? Wow, that’s just,” _that’s a long time for no one to notice._

“Spencer said he got Brendon to leave Ryan on this past tour, but Brendon wanted to talk to Ryan, to encourage him to go get help.”

“And Ryan responded  by beating and raping him?” Patrick hears twin gasps behind him, forgetting until that moment he wasn’t alone in his studio. He turns to see William and Travie staring at him in shock. _Well crap,_ he thinks.

“Spencer said there was blood everywhere.”

Patrick doesn’t swear, but he has few choice words for that monster right now. He feels sick to his stomach.

“I’ll take care of the label stuff, make sure no press gets ahold of this, or God forbid that shitty TMZ. But, I think Spencer and Brendon really need _you_ right now.”

Pete puts far too much faith in him, but he says, “I’ll be right there,” and meets William’s, and then Travie’s eyes.

“I’m calling Zack, too. Do you want me to have him pick you up?”

“No, I can get there quicker if I leave now.”  

“Thank you so much Patrick.”

“No, don’t,” he says, hanging up the phone. Pete may put too much faith in him, but Patrick wants to be there for his friends right now. “I have to go,” he says to William and Travie. “Feel free to stay as long as you want.”

William’s hand grabs him before Patrick can make a mad dash out the door. “Ryan,” he swallows heavily, “Ryan raped Brendon?”

Travie sneaks his arm around William’s waist, rests his chin on William’s shoulder. William liked Ryan, considered him a close friend before now. 

“Yeah, listen,” he says, but William cuts him off.

He looks devastated when he says, “and he’s been hitting Brendon for two years?”

Patrick doesn’t say anything, but he knows the way his shoulders sag is answer enough.

“Is this the first time he’s raped Brendon or anyone else?” Travie asks, faltering on the r-word.

“I don’t know,” Patrick says. “Listen, I know you’re going to tell Gabe the whole truth, because you don’t keep anything from him, but let’s just keep that part between the four of us, and Pete. Okay?”

“Gabe can keep a secret. The whole of FBR will probably know everything else by tomorrow, but he wouldn’t tell anyone else that," Travie says.

"Is Pete blacklisting Ryan from the label?” William asks. 

The blacklist was an unofficial list of artists and other employees no longer welcome at FBR. Pete’s probably already added Ryan’s name – he gets a little hotheaded about his friends – and the rest of the label will want to know why. They’ll find out one way or another, but there’s no reason everyone needs to know the whole truth. Of course, many will speculate, especially those who had suspicions about Ryan and Brendon being in a relationship, but that doesn’t mean Patrick’s the one that will confirm those theories, even accidentally through a third-party. Brendon deserves that much privacy.

“Yes,” he says, because even if Pete didn’t tell him that, he knows his best friend. Patrick grabs his keys from the bowl by the door, and is long gone before he gets a reply from either of them.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to post this in three parts instead of two because (a) of how long this story has gotten, and (b) I feel really bad about how long this is taking me to finish. The third part I think will be exclusively from Brendon and Spencer's POV, while this part features POVs from a few outside characters.
> 
> When Gabe is speaking, and the words are italicized, it means he is speaking in Spanish. However, I know absolutely no Spanish whatsoever, and I didn't want to use an online translator, because those are crap.
> 
> There is one scene in here that I was really hesitant to keep in. I may change my mind and delete it later, but let me know what you think.

 

Everyone stops and stares at Gabe when his cell phone rings in the middle of recording. It’s far too late to be at the studio, but they were almost finished with the song, and needed just a little bit more time to get it right. “Oops,” Gabe says to his band, shrugging his shoulders with a cheeky smile. When he sees William’s name on the screen, he excuses himself to the door to answer.

_"Hello, my loves. How may Gabe’s escort service pleasure you today?"_

“Gabe, I don’t know how to say this,” William says. “Um.”

He hears shuffling on the other end of the phone, and he grabs onto the nearest available surface to steady himself. This isn’t William playing some sort of joke on him. This is one of his partners sounding like he’s about to cry and lay horrible news on him, and he doesn’t know why. His immediate thoughts go to Travie, that maybe there’s been some sort of accident and Travie’s hurt or…

Then Travis says in the phone, “Gabe, we’re blacklisting Ryan Ross. From the label and…and from us.”

“What did Ross do?” he asks. In his entire time with FBR, he’s never seen anyone blacklisted. Normally this news would delight him, but Ryan must have done some seriously fucked up shit to get himself thrown out, like murder someone. He sneaks a glance over at Victoria. She’s watching him curiously. His face must show it all.

“Ryan,” Travie says, then sighs into the phone. “Did you know Brendon and Ryan were in a relationship?”

“No clue they were boning each other,” he says, trying to act normal to throw off Victoria's suspicion, and failing miserably. He’s not sure what the sudden shift in conversation means, or what it has to do with Ryan’s blacklist, but it can’t be anything good.

“I don’t think anyone did,” Travie says. “That’s how Brendon managed to hide the fact that Ryan’s been abusing him for two years.”

 _“That bastard,”_ he says, gripping the door frame harder. He understands why William is so upset – he genuinely liked Ryan – but still, this doesn’t explain the blacklist. He’s heard of other individuals with FBR in the past accused of mistreating their significant other, and nothing coming out of it, except the label pushing their next CD or tour. Nor is this the first time he’s ever heard of one band member beating up another, and again nothing came of that. That means something worse happened, something so vile that no one wants anything to do with Ross anymore. _“What else did he do?_ "

“Uh,” Travie says. Gabe forgot he doesn’t know enough Spanish to translate yet.

But William does, says, “Brendon’s in the hospital right now. Ryan did a number on him and…Gabe you can’t tell anyone what we’re about to tell you.”

 _“Cross my heart,”_ Gabe promises, sneaking another glance at Victoria’s, who’s taken on a particular pinched expression. _“Tell me, my love.”_

“Ryan raped Brendon,” William says, voice breaking.

William’s revelation is met with silence that stretches on, its tendrils reaching across the expanse to grab onto Victoria who looks up, meets his eyes. Gabe is never silent. Gabe always has something to say in every possible situation. He knows that just as much as Victoria. Then the tendrils snap, and so does Gabe. “I,” he says. “That sick son of a bitch. I’ll fucking kill him. I swear." Nate, Ryland, and Alex all stare at him in surprise. So he switches back to Spanish, calls Ross every swear word he can think of, until he runs out of steam. _“I am going to tie him up in a room full of rats and let them eat him alive,”_ he says at last, falling silent once more.

“I know,” William says. “God, I know. But don’t do anything rash.”

“Fuck, okay” Gabe concedes, though he promises nothing if he actually sees the little pecker ever again.

“We love you,” William says in a small voice. Out of all of them, William knew Ryan the best. Gabe knows how much William is probably beating himself up for not even suspecting that Ryan could do something like this.

“I love you guys too. Maybe…”

“Yeah, we’ll be there soon,” Travie says.

“What happened?” Victoria asks, the minute he leaves the door and heads back to his band. “Are Travie and Bill okay?”

“They’re fine,” he reassures her, then throws his hands out wide, a gesture his band knows means he has big news. “FBR blacklisted Ryan Ross. And Bill, Travie and I want nothing to do with that fucker anymore.”

Ryland looks pretty uninterested with the entire ordeal, while Alex and Nate look mildly surprised. They don’t understand how big a deal this is.

“What did he do?” Victoria asks.

“Beat the shit out of Brendon,” he says. That peaks the rest of his band’s interest, as they pay a little more attention to the conversation.

Victoria just looks sad. “And?”

Gabe just looks away with a shrug in response. Normally he’s all for spreading gossip, but this is one secret he’s not too keen on sharing.

“Yeah, okay,” Victoria says, and he knows she gets it, and maybe even guessed the correct reason why. She’s good at reading his silences. “That’s…I’m gonna call Greta.”

“Yeah, good idea. Let’s take a break. Meet back here tomorrow?” Gabe says, and starts walking away without waiting for a response.

Gabe pulls up his own contacts from his phone, and hits dial on the first one. By morning, most of the FBR family will know the truth about Ryan.

Good, Gabe thinks. Knowing Brendon most likely won’t press charges, he hopes Ryan spends the rest of his days friendless and alone and fucking miserable in a dirty hovel.

It’s better than he deserves.

*

When Patrick arrives at the hospital, Zack is already there. He’s standing by a little red sports car, staring into the car, hand tightly gripping the open passenger door. The copper scent of blood assaults his nose before he can even reach Zack. Apprehensively, Patrick approaches the car, looks in, and swallows to keep the contents of his stomach in place.

There are a few smears of red across the passenger window, but it’s the crumpled up towel on the seat with a slowly darkening stain that churns his stomach. Patrick’s never seen that much blood at once before.

“Is it?” Patrick asks, gesturing to the towel.

“I don’t know.” Zack reaches for the towel, lifts it up. They both can see the haematic stain on the seat below.

“I’ll call someone to come clean this, so they don’t have to see it.”

“Pete might know a guy that can get you in early in the morning,” Patrick says.

“Yeah, okay,” Zack says, nodding along a little too much, before he kicks the wheel of Spencer’s car. “Fuck, I should've stopped it. I fucking suspected Ryan was…but I never thought it was this bad. I never…”

Patrick doesn’t know how to respond to that. He thinks a lot of people knew or suspected and didn’t say anything, didn’t try to stop it from happening. But playing the blame game is not going to make anything better now.

“You should go inside,” Zack says, shaking his head. “I’ll take care of this. Tell Spence I’m coming.”

He sees Spencer sitting in a chair, longs legs spread out before him, face buried in his hands. Patrick is really good at dealing with people in a crisis. Even if Pete didn’t tell him this all the time, and even if he didn’t have experience, Patrick still would have known this about himself. Maybe it came with taking care of his father in his last days on hospice care, or maybe he’s just naturally a caregiver. It doesn’t matter. What matters the most is that Patrick will always be there when his friends need him.

He settles a hand on Spencer’s shoulder, squeezes a little. “Hey.”

“I shouldn’t have let him go,” Spencer says, his voice hoarse.

“This isn’t your fault, Spencer,” Patrick says, commandeering the seat next to him.

“It is,” Spencer insists, shaking his head with a bitter laugh. “I knew what Ryan was really like. In high school we…had sex, I guess, and it didn’t end well. And I knew Brendon had a crush on him. I knew. If I’d just left the band in high school and we never got famous, or if I’d just warned Brendon to say away from the start.”

It’s illogical. Patrick knows Spencer knows this. If he’d left the band in high school, Ryan probably would have just replaced him and still gotten famous. Spencer was an integral part of the band, but Patrick knew Ryan and Brendon were the real creative force behind it. Warning Brendon before they’d started a relationship probably wouldn’t have done any good either.

“I should have stopped him from going over to Ryan’s, or I should have went with him. I should have done something.”

“If you really thought Ryan was capable of this, you wouldn’t have let him go,” Patrick says. Of this, he is certain.

“Maybe I did know,” Spencer says, looking away with a self-deprecating laugh. “The day I got Brendon to leave Ryan, I caught Ryan trying to force Brendon into giving him a blowjob. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe it could get any worse than that. Maybe I stayed ignorant on purpose.”

“Can you really blame yourself for not wanting to believe the worst in a person?” Patrick says. “Do you blame Brendon for it?”

Spencer meets his eyes. “No, I don’t blame him.”

“Spencer,” Zack nearly shouts, rushing down the hallway, cutting off Patrick’s reply. “How is he?”

“I don’t know yet,” Spencer says, tearing his eyes away from Patrick. “No one’s told me anything. I don’t know if it’s because there’s nothing to tell yet, or if it’s because Brendon asked them not to.”

“I’m sure if there was something to tell, Brendon would want you to know,” Zack says with conviction.

“Would he?” Spencer asks, turning to stare down the other end of the hallway.

Zack does the one thing Patrick wishes he could do, but is too polite too: grabs Spencer’s shoulders and shakes some sense into him.

“Yes,” Zack says, so sure of his answer, it startles Spencer. “You know, there’s a reason he made you his proxy. I told him he didn’t have to assign one, and he didn’t choose Ryan, or Jon, or me, and no offence, but I was probably a better option than you. He chose you, Spencer. He trusts you. This changes nothing.”

*

It’s hours before anyone comes to them with news, giving Spencer plenty of time to ruminate on the reason why.

Zack is convinced what happened won’t shatter Brendon’s trust in him, but Spencer thinks that’s bullshit. This changes everything. The band was now rubble from a building with an always shaky foundation reduced to smoldering ashes after a bomb dropped on it. Since day one, he’d been on one side and Ryan on the other, with Jon consistently leaning towards Ryan’s side since he joined the band. Spencer had seen the collapse of the band coming for a long time. But after the flames died down, he always assumed he’d still have Brendon. Now he’s not so sure of that anymore.

The sun starts to peak in through the siding glass entrance of the hospital, the only portal to the outside world signaling just how long they’ve been sitting there. The longer they wait, the longer Spencer wonders why they haven’t heard any news.

Before he can crawl too far down the rabbit hole of shame and self-pity, someone calls his name.

He jumps to his feet, dislodging the hands on his shoulders, and ignoring the stares at his back as he briskly walks to the woman who called his name.

“Uh, yes,” he says, to the petite woman in a white lab coat with brown hair messily pulled back into a bun.

“Why don’t we go somewhere more private,” the doctor says, leading him down the hallway to an office. She settles behind her desk, hands folded on top, as he forces himself to sit. He feels vaguely like a child called into the principal’s office. “Mr. Urie has agreed to allow me to provide details on his condition to you.”

“He has?” he says, chewing on his fingernail, something he hasn’t done in ages.

“Yes,” she replies, her forced smile more a grimace than anything else. “Both Brendon’s ulna and radius of his right arm are fractured. It’s a spiral fracture, something we commonly see in abuse victims when someone pulls or twists on the arm too hard. Fractures like that generally require surgery. But we’ve called in an orthopedic surgeon to assess Brendon’s case, and he believes we can just cast the arm and avoid surgery. However, there is a chance his arm won’t heal properly on its own, and he may still need surgery. We’ll know within a week.”

“Brendon’s a musician,” Spencer interrupts. It’s his job as proxy to ask the important question when Brendon is unable to. “Will this interfere with his ability to play guitar or piano?”

“If everything heals well, he shouldn’t have any problems,” she takes the interruption in stride like a professional. “If he ends up needing surgery, there’s always the possibility he loses some range of motion in his hand. That could interfere with his ability to play instruments.”

“So that’s a yes?”

“It’s not a yes, but it is a possibility,” she answers. She pauses, presumably waiting for more questions before continuing. “There were numerous contusions on his back, though none broke through the skin, and at this point we are considering them superficial. What I am more concerned about is the internal damage caused by the rape,” she says, her voice so clinical, Spencer flinches.

“There were several tears to the rectum that required stitches, and some scaring indicating long term sexual abuse. There were also several internal tears that we would never be able to reach without surgery. However,” she quickly adds before Spencer can ask, “the bleeding stopped on its own before he reached the hospital. We feel it’s a better option at this time not to perform surgery and to see what happens. I am going to prescribe him some heavy-duty antibiotics, put him on a liquid diet and hopefully the internal lacerations will heal on their own.”

He nods, flexes his fingers before gripping his thighs. “What happens if they don’t heal on their own?”

“Because of their location, there is a strong possibility those lacerations become infected. Worst case scenario, he becomes septic. If that happens, we will most likely have to go in and remove the infected part of his large intestine. We shouldn’t have to remove too much, though, so after he heals, he won’t even know the difference. However, if Mr. Urie is too sick to make the decision, as his proxy, you will need to consent to the surgery.”

Spencer stifles his gasp by pressing his lips together. “Can I see him?”

“The police are with him right now,” she says, holding up a hand to stop his protests. “Before you say anything, by law, no one else is allowed to be in the room while a rape kit is being done. However, though he allowed us to process him, Mr. Urie is refusing to press charges.” She looks vaguely disapproving of this decision. Spencer feels the need to defend it.

“We’re kind of famous. Not that famous,” he clarifies, “but famous enough to make headlines.”

“And I guess that makes it okay for his abuser to get away with it,” she says, leaning back in her chair. “Let me be frank with you, Mr. Smith, this isn’t the first victim of domestic abuse I’ve treated, famous or not. I know how this ends, with the victim returning to their abusive partner, and ending up in a body bag in the morgue. I can tell that you’re not the one that did this to him, because you haven’t started yelling at me or threatened to remove Mr. Urie from the hospital yet. However, if you really care about him, then convince him to press charges, or at the very least help him to leave his abuser before he ends up in the morgue too.”

He nods, unsure how to tell her Brendon already left, this was…this was something that never should have happened. “I can guarantee it’s over.”

She nods her approval. “I’ll believe that when I don’t see him back here again,” she says. “Now let me walk you to his private room.”

*

The news spread faster than Pete thought it would. He should have known it would happen quickly after Patrick texted him that Gabe was now involved. Everyone kept calling him, searching for confirmation straight from the horse’s mouth. Almost all of those conversations started out with ‘what the fuck happened?’ instead of ‘hi.’

He divulged as little information as he could to anyone who called while still trying to stress the seriousness of the situation.

“No, Gabe is not lying,” he found himself saying over and over again. Followed by:

“Yes, Ryan beat the shit out of Brendon.”

“No, I don’t know how he’s doing. I haven’t heard anything from anyone at the hospital yet.”

“Yes, Ryan is blacklisted.”

“Don’t you dare call Brendon, or Spencer or Patrick asking for more details or I’ll black list you too,” he stressed to a few of the concerned, but less intelligent, members of the FBR family.

“I’m not gonna lie,” the PR guy at his label said after one of them finally called him back. “This could easily turn into a huge mess. There’s nothing anywhere on any news sites yet, but I will keep monitoring. In the meantime, we need to come up with a cover story in case anyone does get a hold of this. We can always say ‘no comment,’ but that makes people suspicious, and they might start digging. And you know how that fucking TMZ is. They’ll go looking for a drug problem, and they’ll find this instead, and it’ll be too good of a story for those assholes to pass up. If we give them some lame, boring cover story, it might stop anyone from looking too deep. But I need to know what the damage is so that whatever story we come up with covers everything.”

Pete feels a surge of anger towards the PR guy, but stamps it down. It’s not this guy’s fault, he’s just doing his job. But Pete wants the world to know what Ryan has done, and he’s willing to back Spencer and Brendon if they want to tell the world everything. He understands why they would want to keep it secret, though, and he’s not going to force Brendon to expose the truth. “I haven’t heard anything from anyone at the hospital recently, but Spencer told me his arm is definitely broken,” Pete said.

“Any other visible bruises or injuries that we’ll need to explain away? Will he need surgery? How long is he going to be in the hospital for?”

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Pete said, rubbing the headache forming between his eyes. “Let me call Patrick to see if there are any updates, and I’ll get back to you.”

Patrick doesn’t answer, which doesn’t surprise him. Patrick tends to give his entire focus to the problem, whatever it may be, at hand at the expense of everything else.

Zack answers on the first ring. “Do you know anyone who can get blood out of the upholstery of a car?” Zack says before Pete can say anything. “I’m gonna fucking kill him. I really am,” Zack says more to himself than Pete.

“I know a good cleaner. Just take the car there, and I’ll call them and see if they can’t get you in first thing in the morning,” he says, looking at the time on his phone which says normal business hours start, oh right about now. Has he really been on the phone that long? “Any news?”

“Yeah, the doc came and took Spencer to Brendon’s room a little while ago. Patrick’s in there with them now. It’s about as well as can be expected given the circumstances. They’re gonna just cast his arm for now. The doc said there was a lot of internal damage too, but since the bleeding stopped before he got here, they’re just going to pump him full of antibiotics, keep him here for a few days to monitor, and hope the damage heals on its own. If it doesn’t, they might have to remove part of his intestine.”

“Jesus,” he says, the words forced out of him. It’s worse than he thought. “God, I really hate to do this to any of you right now, but the label wants to know if there are any other visible injuries besides the broken arm. PR wants to create a cover story in case anyone gets a hold of this, unless Brendon wants to come out with the truth.”

“Hold on a sec, let me go a check.” There’s a rustle of fabric, murmured voices too low for him to make out, before Zack says, “I’m being told yes B wants a cover story, and no on any other visible injuries at the moment. He might need surgery on his arm if it doesn’t heal right on its own, but they won’t know if he’ll need the surgery for a few more days.”

“Okay, okay,” he says, trying to sort his scattered thoughts. “Tell B if you see him I’ll be there after I get everything settled, and that everyone wants to know if he’s okay, but I’ve been telling everyone else not to bother them.”

“Good, I don’t think he’s going to be up for too many visitors right now.”

“Joe and Andy were pretty pissed,” Pete says, remembering how Joe vented into the phone for 45 minutes. Andy was just silent, too silent, even for the normally quiet drummer. “I don’t know if they’ll stay away for long.”

“If I can handle a horde of screaming girls, I think I can handle those two.”

“I’ll send you the address for that car place. And once we have a cover story in place, I’ll call for Spencer’s approval. If anything changes…”

“You’ll be the first person I call,” Zack says.

Pete makes a haphazard list of everything that still needs to be done. Ashlee comes in to check on him several times, and brings him breakfast as he makes call after call. Patrick calls him with an update, and he sounds upset when he says Brendon doesn’t want to press charges or file a restraining order.

Pete asks to speak with Brendon, and calmly explains that no matter what he does, Pete and the label will have his back. It doesn’t change Brendon’s mind.

When Pete sees Ryan’s name flash on the screen of his phone, he squeezes the phone so tightly in his hand it almost cracks. He can feel the rage building inside of him, bubbling underneath his calm pretense of ‘I’m totally fine and not about to explode.’ Against his better judgement, he answers the call.

“Hey Pete,” Ryan says, cheerful and without a care. “Great news. Spencer and Brendon are leaving the band, means I get to do my own thing now. I wanted a little bit of advice on—”

Pete cuts him off with a growl, something guttural and inhumane. That sick bastard actually thinks he can just go on like nothing happened? Like everyone’s going to keep catering to his whims?

“How dare you,” Pete snarls into the phone, the rage making his hands start to shake. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch that Brendon doesn’t want to press charges even though I told him he should. But if you think Panic is still your band after everything you’ve done, you’re delusional. You’re not welcome at FBR anymore, and you’re not welcome at my home either. Don’t ever call me again.”

He throws his phone into the wall so hard the screen shatters. “Shit,” he says, kicking his phone across the room. _Stupid_. _Stupid_ , _stupid_ , _stupid_ , he reprimands himself. He sort of needs that phone right now.

Ashlee takes one look at his shattered phone before handing him hers. “Here,” she says, her hand lingering on his shoulder. “If you need anything…”

“I need Ryan to not be a psychopath,” he says, resisting the urge to throw her phone as well.

“Why don’t you go to the hospital?” she suggests. “I can hold down the fort here.”

“But—”

“Just go, baby,” she says, with a kiss to his cheek.

*

Spencer slides in the door, shutting it close without a sound. Brendon appears asleep, but opens his eyes when he hears the shuffle of Spencer’s feet.

“Sorry,” Spencer says.

“I wasn’t asleep,” Brendon says, reaching out for Spencer, jerking his arm back when the IV in the back of his hand catches.

“That’s, that’s not why I’m sorry,” Spencer says, taking the offered hand and smoothing it back down on the sheets.

“It’s not your fault, Spencer.”

“It’s not yours, either,” he says, knowing how hard Brendon is on himself all the time. He wonders how much of that is just part of his personality, and how much of it Ryan beat into him.

Brendon shakes his head, his bottom lip quivering. “I lied, though,” he says. “I lied. I did go over to Ryan’s to try and talk him into getting help, but,” he says, blowing air noisily through his nose. If the next thing Brendon says is ‘I went over there to get back together,’ Spencer knows his chair is going to end up out a shattered window. “I also went there to try and talk him into letting the two of us keep Panic. It was stupid. It’s just… ”

“B,” Spencer says, lacing his fingers with the hand not attached to the IV. “That doesn’t give him the right to hurt you. That doesn’t make this your fault.”

“I didn’t even get to that part before he just…lost it.” Brendon presses his quivering lips together. “I was such an idiot for even bothering.”

“Hey, no,” Spencer says, rubbing his thumb across the back of Brendon’s hand that he’s still holding.

Brendon shakes his head. “I was. I was so stupid for thinking he could ever love me,” Brendon says, his tears soaking into the hospital pillow.

Spencer’s cups his face, and wipes away the tears with his thumb. Spencer had fallen for that trap too. It was an easy one to fall for when you didn’t know what Ryan was really capable of. “Brendon…”

“I let myself get so blinded by Ryan, that I failed to realize that someone did love me, that you did,” Brendon says, placing his hand over the one Spencer has on his face to keep it there. He’d been waiting for Brendon to acknowledge his declaration of love, to say something on the matter. He just hadn’t expected it to be now. “I think part of me realized it a while ago, when you were always there for me even though you didn’t know what Ryan had done, that maybe I loved you back. But,” he says, and Spencer steels himself for the worst. He can handle ‘I’m not ready yet,’ because Spencer has waited this long, he can wait forever if he has to. What he’s not sure he can handle without breaking down is a flat out rejection. “I don’t think I know what love is anymore. It’s all twisted up inside of me with the pain.”

“Love’s not supposed to hurt,” Spencer says. “It’s supposed to make you feel better about yourself.”

“Will you help me learn then?” Brendon says, meeting his eyes, his hand tightening around Spencer’s.

Spencer searches his face, hoping Brendon’s questions means what he thinks it does. Finding the answer in his earnest eyes, he whispers, “Till the day we die.”

*

It’s four days before the hospital lets Brendon leave. He spiked a slight fever the first day, which sent Spencer into a full blown panic attack, curled up on the floor in the hallway, saying ‘I can’t do it, I can’t make that decision for him,’ over and over again to Pete and Patrick. The fever never developed into anything serious, thankfully, and after a painful checkup, which Brendon refused to allow anyone to be there for, the doctor was willing to let him go so long as someone stayed with him.

Spencer packed his car with the gifts their friends sent to the hospital. He thought about throwing away the plethora of get well cards, but decided at the last minute to keep them. Brendon never opened them – he tried, and couldn’t –and they might prove useful in cheering him up later. He had a feeling they were both going to need that.

As he wheeled Brendon to his car with Zack and Patrick by their side, he heard the _pop_ of a flash going off and the distinct sound of a camera shutter. Zack looked around for the perpetrator, but found no one. Rushing Brendon, who was thankfully too drugged out to notice anything, into Spencer’s recently clean and vanilla scented vehicle, they heard several more pictures being snapped, though both Zack and Spencer tried to shield Brendon with their bodies.

“Pete,” Spencer said into his phone as soon as the door slammed shut to his car, “someone just took a picture of us leaving the hospital.”

“You want us to drop the cover story we’ve been working on, or wait to see what they come up with first and respond?”

“I think we should drop the cover story first. Deflate the balloon, so to speak, before it pops,” Spencer says, looking over to Brendon who nods his assent.

“Sure, anything you guys want, you know I’m here for you,” Pete says.

“Thank you, Pete, for everything. Your support means a lot to both of us,” Spencer says.

“Always,” Pete says. “Whatever happens, I’ll be right there with you.”

*

The door opens a crack after Pete knocks on Brendon's door, Spencer's face appearing shrouded in darkness.

"Oh for fuck's sake, let me in," Pete says. He understands the paranoia, especially since Zack isn't there, but Pete has been one of their (if not their number one) staunchest supporters since this whole thing went down. He may not have been as emotionally supportive or as physically present as Patrick, but someone had to dissolve the previous Panic contract with Ryan, create a new one with just Brendon and Spencer, handle any press and keep the label off their backs. Pete hasn’t been this busy in a very, very long time. He’s fucking exhausted.

"Sorry, sorry," Spencer says, opening the door wider. "It's just a panicked gut reaction."

"I understand. It's okay," Pete says. If it was Patrick this happened to, Pete would be hoarding him in his house and refusing to let absolutely anyone else come in. He might even consider kicking Ashlee out. Then again, Pete would never do to Patrick what Ryan did to Brendon. No one's touching his Patrick.

Spencer holds his forefinger over his lip in the universal sign for silence as they skirt past Brendon, who is asleep on the couch, clutching a pillow to his chest with his casted arm, on their way to the kitchen. Patrick greets him with a nod over his cup of tea.

"How is he?" Pete asks, sitting down next to Patrick at the island after a quick hug. Patrick is where he needs to be right now, but that doesn't mean Pete hasn't missed him in the last four weeks Patrick's been camping out in Brendon's spare room.

"Physically, he’s exhausted. He’s still on that liquid diet until at least his checkup in two days, so he’s lost more weight than he can afford to lose. Doc thinks it’ll be a few more weeks until he can get the cast off,” Patrick says.

“And what about the, uh, rest?” Pete vaguely asks. He is, after all, a dude. Emotions were always more Patrick’s thing than his.

Patrick shoots a worried glance at Spencer who is hovering at the entrance to the kitchen between them and Brendon. “It's...He hasn't left the couch in four weeks. I think he might be in denial still. Since his talk with Spencer at the hospital, he hasn't reacted much."

"To uh, to what happened?"

"To anything, at all," Spencer clarifies. "He just sits there." Spencer peaks a glance back at Brendon, before walking to the island, his steps stilted. He hesitates before sitting down. “He doesn’t even want to play music.”

"How are you both holding up?" Pete asks, worried the toll this is taking on everyone.

Patrick just shrugs, as Spencer says, "It's, whatever," with some sort of vague hand gesture.

"I really hate to do this to you Spencer, and I wouldn't ask if I didn't have to," he starts, waiting for Spencer to turn his gaze away from the living back to him.

"You're gonna ask whether or not we want to back out of the tour,” Spencer says.

“Yeah, it’s only four weeks away. You don’t have a whole lot of time to decide. And if you want to do the tour, then you need a replacement for Ross. And what about Jon?”

“What about Jon?” Spencer says, his tone ice cold. Spencer had been skirting around the issue of Jon since the day after Brendon was admitted to the hospital.

“You can’t keep avoiding him. What happened between you two?” Patrick says, making an aborted movement to place a hand on Spencer’s shoulder, and pulling away before making contact because of how tightly strung Spencer is. “I know you talked to him on the phone at the hospital.”

“He knew,” Spencer says with a shake of his, “He knew what Ryan was doing to Brendon long before I found out. It’s not even that I’m mad about, well, not really,” Spencer says, stiffly uncurling his fingers from the tight fist he’d been making. “He did call while we were at the hospital. I told him B was there because Ryan beat the crap out of him, and he asked…” Spencer bites his lip, and sneaks another glance at Brendon.

“What did he ask?” Patrick asks, his own hands furling into fists.

“He asked me what Brendon did to deserve it. I couldn’t…I didn’t even say anything. I just hung up on him, and I’ve ignored every single one of his calls since. I just can’t talk to him right now, maybe ever. If I can't even talk to him on the phone, how am I supposed to be in the same room as him? How can I expect Brendon to be around him?"

*

Brendon’s not as asleep as he’s pretending to be, hasn’t been the majority of the four weeks he’s been home. He sleeps fitfully a few hours during the night and day, and spends the rest of his time pretending the rest of the world isn’t there, and that Patrick, Spencer, and sometimes Zack aren’t hovering like he’s some sort of invalid, or worse, some sort of child.

He just wants…Brendon doesn’t really know what he wants. He doesn’t want them to leave, but he doesn’t want them to keep treating him like he can’t take care of himself. It’s not like this is the first time Ryan’s…he hadn’t wanted it in almost a year before he actually broke things off. He’s stronger than they think he is.

And Brendon’s going to prove it to them.

"Thank fuck, finally someone answers," Jon says, both snide and tiny bit pissy. Brendon wants to be angry, wished he had that much energy. He'd been the one to call Jon after all. But mostly, he's just hurt. _Did_ _he_ _really_ _ask_ _what_ _I_ _did_ _to_ _deserve_ _it_?

"Why do you always side with Ryan?"

"Brendon, that's not important right now. We need to talk about the –"

"Nothing's ever important to you, but the music and Ryan is it?" Brendon cuts in, wishing his voice sounded angry and not so defeated.

"B, I...the band...Ryan is a brilliant musician."

"And I'm just a voice over the speaker to you, aren't I? Just another set of hands that can play bass or guitar, but not something important enough to care about." He taps the phone impatiently on his ear to distract himself.

"Brendon, can't we just--"

"No! I want to know, Jon. I know you don’t care, but this is important to me. Why do you always side with Ryan? Even when Ryan is being a pissy little bitch, even when you know he's wrong? Every fucking time."

"I didn't know," Jon insists. "I didn't know he was...I just thought you guys were kinky, that’s it."

"You can't use that as an excuse!" Brendon says, tearing at his own hair. He remembers the day Jon found out, walked in on Ryan hurting him. Ryan had found Brendon working on new material by himself. He’d made sure to remind Brendon of his place in the band, telling him how silly and trite his lyrics were, that his music wasn’t worth the notebook Brendon was writing in, and that he was never going to allow any of Brendon’s work on the next CD unless he worked for it, paid for it with his body like a whore. He’d had his hands wrapped around Brendon’s throat too, squeezing too tightly for him to talk. He'd be hoarse for the concert that night, his voice sounding like absolute shit. That used to matter to Ryan, and both Brendon and Jon knew in that moment it didn't matter to Ryan anymore. It still baffles Brendon to this day that Jon took Ryan’s excuse of just ‘having a little fun’ before he backed out of the room. "You saw. You heard what he said. How could you ever think that was something I wanted?"

"Brendon," he says, desperate this time.

 _Good_ , Brendon thinks. _Now_ _he_ _knows_ _how_ _I felt_.

"Shut up! I'm not done. You didn't even try to stop him, and you kept, you kept looking at me like it was my fault. Like I was the disgusting one. You're part of the reason I never told anyone, because I thought everyone would react like you, that everyone would side with Ryan."

"I didn't think it was that big a deal," Jon says, and he sounds so nonchalant, so unconcerned, that Brendon scoffs.

"You didn't think it was that big of a deal that I was getting beaten up by the guy no one even knew I was also sleeping with."

"I think you're just making a big deal out of nothing. If the four of us just sat down and talked about it –"

"That's not going to happen,” he says, voice like a thick layer of ice on brittle glass. “We're done with Ryan, Spencer and I, the label, everyone. Tell me, Jon, are you still taking his side. Is he still more important to you than me knowing he beats people up just for the Hell of it? And are you really going to lie to me again and say it’s just for the music?"

"B," Jon says, then falls silent.

"Yeah, that's what I thought. Do me a favor and tell bastard to go fuck himself. Loose this number while you’re at it." He throws his cellphone on the ground, and stomps on it with the heel of his foot until it shatters just to be sure no one can call him on it anymore. He needs a new number, one only the people he chooses knows.

For the first time in days, he rises from the couch for a reason other than using the bathroom or changing his clothes, resolutely ignoring the twinge of pain that still comes when he moves.

“You have to at least talk to Jon,” he hears Pete tell a reluctant Spencer. “Even if it’s just to tell the fucker to get lost.”

"Jon's not coming back," he announces, as he shuffles into the kitchen, wincing when he sits down.

"You talked to him?" Patrick asks, quickly hiding his surprise at seeing Brendon off the couch. He loves Patrick, but he's starting to wonder if Patrick thinks he's too emotionally vulnerable to handle life right now. Brendon's stronger than everyone thinks. He is, he swears.

"Just got off the phone with him," he says, grabbing a donut from the box on the island, just to have something in his hands.

Spencer sneaks a glance at his hands, but doesn’t tell him to let it go, trusts him not to do anything rash. "And?" Spencer prompts.

"He chose Ryan, like he always does," Brendon says with a shrug, trying to downplay the rejection like it doesn't sting like the bite of a scorpion, as he reduces the donut to crumbs piece by piece.

"Does he know?" Pete asks, absolutely incredulous that anyone could side with Ryan after knowing the truth.

"Not about the..." Brendon starts, but he can't say it. He can't. "But he's known about the other stuff a lot longer than anyone else."

"And he didn't say anything about it?" Patrick asks, just as incredulous as Pete.

"The music has always been more important to him than anything else, and that’s why he sides with Ryan," he says with another shrug. I’m not hurt, he tells himself, it’s fine. Everything’s fine. “I still want to do the tour,” he quietly admits before anyone can say anything on the matter of Jon. “I’m just not sure I’ll be strong enough physically by then to do everything I usually do. Though I do have some ideas to work around it.”

“Whatever you want to do is fine,” Pete says very carefully.

“I’ve thought about it a lot, and I know Ian, you know, Crawford, just left the Cab, and he might be willing to play with us. I don’t even know if I’ll have the cast off before tour starts, but I could –”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Spencer says, sliding closer and placing both hands on Brendon’s shoulders. He didn’t realize how badly he’d been shaking until Spencer settled him.

“I don’t...” Brendon says. He thought he was strong enough to move on, to pack up his shit and carry on. But he can’t do this right now, plan a fucking tour in just four weeks, and audition replacements, and squeeze in practice time, and deal with what happened _and_ deal with Jon’s betrayal, and write new music and...It’s too much. “Why would he do that?” he asks, and lets Spencer pull him towards his chest. “Why?”

“I don’t know, B,” Spencer says. “I don’t know.”

*

Dallon doesn’t know what to expect on his first tour with Panic! at the Disco. He’s met Brendon and Spencer several times before they asked him to fill in on bass, and they seemed liked pretty cool guys who definitely partied, but not excessively. Dallon figured with his more conservative lifestyle (compared to the average rock star) he’d fit right in.

His reception upon walking in to their first practice three weeks before tour is so cold it burns. He runs into Pete and Patrick first, who are hanging around for reasons Dallon is not privy to.

“Is this the room for Panic?” he asks, wondering if maybe Fall Out Boy were here practicing before the tour too, and maybe Zack gave him the wrong room number by accident. The glare on Pete’s face is enough to make Dallon wither and die on the inside like a potato baked too long in the microwave. Patrick offers a somewhat apologetic smile, before nodding and opening the door for him.

Ian is already tuning his guitar, Spencer tapping out random beats behind the drum kit. He spots Brendon sitting on one of those donut-shaped pillows at the piano, his back ramrod straight, and heads over. Zack makes an aborted movement in his direction, before relaxing against the wall, but Spencer rises from his kit and places himself between Brendon and him.

Odd, he thinks, but keeps his expression neutral. He’s not about to offend his new band.

Dallon, from his few short encounters with Panic, remembers Brendon being loud, exuberant and extremely extroverted, and always in constant motion, whether tapping out a beat with his foot, or jittering in his seat, something. This Brendon that meets him is pale and drawn, his arm in a white, plaster cast, and he looks like he hasn’t eaten in weeks.

Brendon doesn’t meet his eyes when he approaches. Spencer leads Dallon away with a hand on the shoulder before he can even say hi, and points to the amp for his bass.

“We’re gonna stick with the set list we gave you guys for now, though it may change before the tour,” Spencer says, sneaking a glance at Brendon who is starring at his piano. “We’ll start with I Write Sins because all our fans know that song, so we’ll definitely play it on tour.”

It’s only once Spencer starts counting off the beat that Dallon realizes he never learned the songs. It hadn’t even crossed his mind. _Way to make a great first impression there, Dallon,_ he chastises himself in his head as he tells Spencer he forgot to learn their songs.

Spencer’s sort of staring at him like he grew a second head, and the sigh that comes from Zack is definitely one of annoyance.

“G, D, A, D,” Brendon says. It’s quiet, but frustrated, Dallon thinks. “Just follow along with Ian.”

 _I_ _can_ _do_ _that_ , he thinks, and he doesn’t think it sounds too terrible. However, they do cut practice short after that, with Brendon ending the practice by not so gently reminding Dallon that maybe he should learn all the songs before their next practice.

“Yeah, sorry,” he says sheepishly, absentmindedly strumming his bass. “I didn’t think.”

Practice does not get any better than that.

Spencer was always sort of the quiet, mature type, but he doesn't remember Spencer being super glued to Brendon's side, glaring, and once ever growling, at anyone who approached, and he doesn’t remember Spencer being so strung out all the time. Zack wasn't any better, refusing to let Brendon or Spencer go anywhere without security supervision. If Zack could have literally become their shadow, Dallon thinks he would have.

Brendon is easily frustrated by every little thing that goes wrong in practice, but he never voices his concerns to anyone, but Spencer, and doesn't usually take his frustration out on Dallon or Ian. Brendon's also easily rattled, easily startled, and nearly breaks down in tears when he forgets his arm is broken and realizes once again that he can't play the piano, drums, or guitar (though Spencer quickly leads him away before a full-blown meltdown occurs, and Ian and Dallon both look the other way).

Pete and Patrick are almost always there too, though Dallon has concluded it’s not to practice. He gets the impression they don’t like him much, but he remembers them being so laid back, and open and friendly before.

There's no life in Brendon when they're practicing, none of that stage presence Panic is kind of famous for these days. He just shows up, sings, tells Ian and Dallon what they're doing wrong, and then leaves, while Zack and Spencer share worried looks behind his back.

The word DRUGS flashes in giant warning lights in his head. He’s been around enough rock stars to parse out that drugs are always the cause. That’s the kind of situation he likes to avoid, but he accepts the position anyways, because he kind of needs a job right now and it’d be a dick move to back out when the tour is so close. Plus, who would miss a chance to tour with Blink 182 and Fall Out Boy, even if two members of his band are possibly on drugs.

It takes a while for the gossip vine to catch up to Dallon, he tends to stay far away from that kind of thing, and everyone in his near vicinity is extremely tight lipped about whatever went down with Ross and Walker.

It’s Darren Robinson that texts him about, the former guitarist for Phantom Planet who he worked with while recording Violent Things for the Brobecks.

 _U playin with Panic now? Heard what happened with Ross. Tell Brendon I hope he feels better soon,_ the text reads.

How is it that people who are barely involved with FBR anymore know more about his band than he does?

He contemplates pretending to know what is going on and texting something trite in response, but his curiosity gets the better of him, and he texts: _What happened?_

He assumes this has something to do with the broken arm, that up until this point, Dallon had noticed, but had not really been aware of or put much thought into. It was just sort of there, and he didn’t think to question it, like he didn’t think to learn the songs on the set list Spencer sent him before his first practice.

 _U don’t know?_   Robinson texts, and Dallon feels distinctly like he’s being made fun of. _Ross beat the shit out of Urie._

He dismisses the news as more inaccurate gossip from the FBR vine, which is like playing a game of telephone, the message is never same at the end of the line as it is as the beginning. But…when Dallon thinks about it, everyone’s behavioral changes make much more sense than if it was drugs.

He does the not very smart thing and Googles it, which results in a Livejournal page, which he doesn’t dare click on, and the FBR press release regarding Brendon’s broken arm. It says Brendon tripped over his dog and fell near his pool, resulting in a broken arm and a concussion. _Yeah_ _right_ , Dallon thinks. He’s no doctor, but that doesn’t sound like something that requires four days in the hospital.

It’s suspicious.

Therefore, it's no real surprise when Zack sits them down on the first day of tour to lecture both Ian and him on more than just the usual tour rules.

“Some Panic fans can get a little bat shit crazy,” Zack winds the first part of lecture down with, after going over common decency rules and ethics like no sex or masturbating anywhere except their own bunks, and no leaving moldy food or empty boxes in the kitchen. “You can accept food from them so you don’t feel like you’ve hurt their feelings or whatever, but don’t you dare eat or drink anything given to you by a fan. No going anywhere without telling anyone, you’re both too pretty to get roofied and mauled by a psychopath.”

Ian looks a little green at the prospect. This is a bit new for both of them. They’d both seen success with their respective bands, but not on the same level as Panic, and it’s a little daunting to think of the kind of response they may get from fans, whether welcoming or not.

“I need you guys to really listen to me now,” he says, and Dallon is well aware that Zack is purposefully towering over them as they sit like children beneath him in the lounge. “What I say next, doesn’t leave the bus, and you are not to discuss it anywhere, ever again, even with each other or me.” He waits for both of them to nod, before he crosses his arms, says, “You’ve probably heard a few rumors by now about Ross.”

Ian shifts uncomfortably in his seat, and looks to Dallon. He can tell the young guitarist wants to ask. Dallon, who has never been very good at controlling his mouth, or been very good at self-preservation apparently, speaks up. “Yeah, uh, heard Ross beat Brendon up, and uh, broke his arm,” he says, trying to play it off like it’s some ridiculous rumor that couldn’t possibly be true.

Dallon’s not quite expecting the shock when Zack says, “It’s true. Don’t ask anyone about it. And that means anyone, not me, not anyone in Fall Out Boy, and especially not Brendon or Spencer. I can’t stop you from speculating, but don’t you dare talk about it outside of your own head. Don’t bring up Ryan or Jon, don’t even mention their names, ever. Got it?” he asks, crossing his arms and staring down at them.

Wide-eyed, Ian nods his assent. Zack waits for him to nod too, before he continues. “Brendon and Spencer are going through a really tough time right now. Don’t be offended if they don’t talk to you much. They really need their space, and they need the support and care of their friends. You do not have to be their friend. You’re not going to hurt either of their feelings if this is just a temporary job to you, and you don’t give two shits about either of them. But don’t pretend to care about them if you really don’t. I catch you doing something like that, and I will throw you out of the bus in front of a semi while it’s going 90 down the highway. Are we clear?”

Ian looks downright terrified now, but Dallon just feels a little sick. He’s not stupid, he can add 2 and 2 to get 4, so he knows there’s something more going on than Ross losing his temper once and taking it out on Brendon.

Of course, because he is Dallon the clutzy, awkward dork according to absolutely everyone he went to high school with, he voices his thoughts out loud in the form of a question.

Zack’s answering glare is downright terrifying. “I like you, Dallon,” he says. “So I’m going to pretend you never asked that.”

The next two weeks suck, and yeah Dallon wanted the job, but he’s starting to regret taking it now. Dallon doesn’t remember touring ever being this lonely. It’s usually a bunch of men, and sometimes women, packed like sardines into a tiny bus, living on top of one another, and generally getting so sick of one another’s constant presence within the first week that you start to hate the people you love.

This bus however just feels…empty. There’s Zack, who Dallon is still too terrified to talk much around, and the usual techs, who he thinks might be too terrified to talk at all after receiving a similar lecture to the one he got from Zack. The techs also make themselves scarce when they’re not working or sleeping, which isn’t very often.

Brendon and Spencer are either in their own respective bunks, in each other’s bunk, or most often, on Pete and Patrick’s bus where they often spend the night while travelling. It took him two days just to realize that at some point Brendon had had his cast removed. When he’s not wondering where everyone else is, Dallon spends most of his free time in the back lounge reading, watching movies or playing video games alone or with Ian, and the rest of his free time talking to Breezy.

So it’s a surprise to hear their voices coming from the kitchen as he forces himself awake one morning. By the time he actually crawls into the kitchenette after a long, sleepless night because of the bumpy road they were travelling on that shouldn’t be allowed to exist, everyone’s long gone, but Ian. “Where’s Brendon and Spencer?” he asks Ian. “I thought I heard their voices.”

“Went to get breakfast with Fall Out Boy at some diner Joe insisted was awesome,” Ian says.

“They told you this?” he asks. Dallon’s totally not jealous of the way Ian easily coaxes Brendon out of his shell, when Dallon’s barely gotten a complete sentence out of him or Spencer in the last five weeks.

“Yes,” Ian says slowly, while looking at him funny.

“Does it bother you?” Dallon asks, because two weeks of tour hadn’t taught him how to control his mouth. “That we’re not invited on their little outings?”

“Not really,” Ian says with a shrug. “They’re all really tight, and they don’t quite trust us yet. They’ve got things they want to hide, and it’s none of my business.”

Dallon hadn’t thought of it like that, because aside from a few minor embarrassing instances in his adolescent years, which everyone has, there’s not much in his life he really feels the need to hide.

He concedes to the point that whatever happened is, in fact, none of his business, and his new bandmates (friends?) deserve their privacy. However, the longer tour drags on, the more Dallon starts to think maybe he wasn’t so wrong about the drug problem after all.

It’s highly suspect the way Brendon finds his charisma and energy for the stage despite the listlessness and lethargy off stage, and how he acts like the Dallon remembers before shit hit the proverbial fan around Mark Hoppus and Travis Backer before and after shows. There’s something suspect about Spencer’s behavior too, about the way his eyes are always a little red-rimmed, his skin so pale it’s almost translucent, and how bloated he looks sometimes.

Still Brendon and Spencer don’t need the advice of some guy who’s never known the struggle, and they’re already under the protection of Pete who has struggled and came out the other side. So he leaves it alone.

He starts to worry, though, when its clear Pete and Patrick are just kind of, not ignoring the problem (if there is one), but passive-aggressively responding to it, or skirting around it completely. He can tell so, in the rare moments that he is actually around all four of them, which doesn’t happen often, by how many times Patrick tries to start a conversation and fails, and how Pete just looks lost.

Then Brendon goes missing shortly before sound check (and by missing, Dallon assumes Zack means he’s been out of sight of Spencer, Pete, Patrick, and Zack for 30 seconds). Spencer is freaking the fuck out and Zack’s already organized a search and rescue team out of Panic, Fall Out Boy and any tech that is currently not busy.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Dallon finds himself placating Spencer, Pete, and Patrick, but no one listens to him, so he joins the search. Zack has magically acquired blueprints of the venue, and assigned each person a section to search. Somehow, they all missed the most obvious place to search.

It’s Dallon that finds Brendon behind the building, sitting with his back against the cold, brick tiles, smoking a cigarette. “Got locked out?” Dallon asks, taking a seat next to him, but leaving enough space between them so as not to appear threatening. Dallon knows his height can sometimes be a bit intimidating.

Brendon startles, watches Dallon’s every minute movement, before shrugging. “I don’t think so. I didn’t try,” he says.

“You went missing. Everyone’s freaking out.”

“Shit, really? He’s probably pissed,” Brendon says, but doesn’t specify who.

“No,” Dallon assures, assuming he’s talking about Spencer or maybe Zack. “Just worried.”

He can hear the beeping of a truck backing up close by, the chatter of a large crowd of people waiting to be let into the venue. Brendon smokes his cigarette and stares at the chain link fence separating the venue from the outside world.

“If you just need a few moments by yourself, you know that’s okay, right? I know how tour can get,” Dallon says. “I’ll let everyone know that I found you and you’re fine, but I won’t tell them where.”

“Can you?” Brendon asks, looking so hopeful and scared at the same time.

“Of course. Just come in eventually, yeah?” he asks, not entirely sure Brendon wouldn’t sit out here all night if no one came back for him.

“I would never miss sound check,” Brendon insists. “Don’t uh, don’t tell him about the cigarettes.”

Dallon agrees, though he still isn’t quite sure who Brendon is referring too.

He never finds any physical proof of drugs, if either of them are doing drugs, it’s never where Dallon can see it, and he never finds drugs lying around anywhere. Of course that doesn’t curb his suspicions. Because Brendon gets worse, more manic on stage, and withdrawn off stage. And the worse Brendon gets, the worse Spencer gets, paler, and shakier and acting like he hasn’t slept in days. The worse Spencer gets, the worse Brendon gets. It’s a vicious loop, and Dallon keeps trying to tell himself that it’s none of his business, that he barely knows these people.

But damnit, he _does_ care, and not just because he needs the job.

Whatever the others are doing about it clearly isn’t working. So the next time Brendon goes ‘missing,’ he finds him out back once again (seriously, why does no one else check there) and corners him. He leaves the only door to the sectioned off area wide open, though. His intention is not to scare or intimidate Brendon, because Brendon is kind of like his boss, and this conversation will never work that way. But this conversation is going to happen, so he stands near the only exit.

“Brendon are you using drugs to get yourself through performances?” he cuts straight to the heart of the matter, no bullshitting around.

“I…no,” Brendon says, scooting away, keeping his eyes glued to Dallon’s hands.

“I’m starting to get that something pretty shitty happened. You don’t have to tell me about it,” Dallon says, sitting down even though the ground is disgusting to make himself less intimidating. “But you have to know that at some point you have to deal with it. Whatever you are doing is clearly not working and just a temporary solution. You’re just going to make yourself feel worse in the long run.”

“I know,” Brendon says, then surprises Dallon by taking his eyes off of him. “I just don’t want to disappoint anyone, you know? The fans pay to come see us, and maybe I need to prove that I can do this.”

“But you’re not proving anything,” Dallon says, and it’s harsh, but it just might be what gets through to him. “Not right now, and not like this. You’re doing the exact opposite of proving you can do it.”

Brendon looks away, his left leg starting to bounce.

“You’re risking your own health, and your career, and you’re taking Spencer down with you,” he places the last nail on what he hopes is a bridge and not a coffin.

“Why are you doing this?” Brendon asks, his voice so quiet, Dallon almost misses it over the noises from the crowd out front of the building.

“Because I care. I care what happens to you, and I care what happens to Spencer, and I don’t want to see either of you go down this path. It never ends well.”

Brendon stomps out the butt of his cigarette with the heel of his foot, before standing to his feet. “Okay,” he says, and walks away leaving Dallon standing alone.

He corners Spencer alone next, before Brendon has a chance to talk to him. “You need to pull yourself together,” Dallon says, taking the tough love approach again. Sometimes, it’s the only thing that gets through to people. “You’re not helping anyone, especially Brendon, by going down this path.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Spencer argues.

“I know about the drugs,” he says, which he really doesn’t, but it stops Spencer from walking away. “I know about the drugs, and I know that never ends well. You have to fix whatever it is that’s broken, instead of just masking the problem. I don’t mean to be cruel, but if Brendon can’t fix himself right now, you have to be the responsible one. You have to take care of yourself. You’ll only make the problem worse if your problems go to the waste side.”

Spencer’s shoulders slump. “I kind of hate you right now,” Spencer says. “But you’re a good guy, Dallon.”

Dallon wonders if he’s ruined his chance to stay in this band long term, but no one acts any colder than usual to him for the duration of the show. When Dallon walks onto the bus last after the concert that night (he’d totally been conned into taking the last shower) Spencer is dumping a bag of cards onto Brendon’s lap, who’s sitting on the couch. “We’re gonna read every single one of these cards our friends sent you,” Spencer says, then grabs another bag, larger than the first. “Then we’re gonna read as many of these cards our fans sent you as we can.”

“Spencer, I…”

“Every single one,” Spencer says, grabbing a sparkly blue envelope off the top of the pile and tearing it open, before thrusting the card into Brendon’s hands. “Read it,” he insists, before turning to Dallon. “Privacy, dude,” Spencer says, but winks to take the sting out of it.

When Dallon wakes up in the morning, after being lulled to sleep the night before by the sound of soft chatter and laughter coming from the front of the bus, Brendon and Spencer are still in the front lounge curled around one another. There are several neat piles of cards sitting on the couch to Brendon’s left, both bags are completely empty, and envelopes and glitter litter the floor. Brendon’s head is resting on Spencer’s shoulder, Spencer’s head on top of his, and both their clothes are covered in glitter. It’s adorable.

Dallon assumes they’re both still asleep, so he tip-toes past them until Brendon sticks his leg out, tripping him. His long limbs save him from going down as he catches himself on the side of the bus. Dallon glares at Brendon, who’s snickering quietly.

“Can you get me a bottle of water?” Brendon asks. “I don’t want to wake up Spencer,” who wuffles in his sleep like a puppy, rubbing his cheek in Brendon’s hair.

Things are better after that. Brendon loses some of his crazy, excessive stage energy, but gains more presence off-stage. He also spends more time invading Dallon and Ian’s space on stage too, but after watching videos of old Panic! live performances, he sort of expected that one.

Things aren’t back to normal. Dallon would be worried if they were because you can’t just expect someone to get over trauma with a snap of the fingers. It doesn’t work like that. But Brendon and Spencer are trying now, and he hopes they’re developing healthier coping mechanisms than whatever wasn’t for working for them before.

When Pete takes him out to dinner with Fall Out Boy, Panic, and (he refuses to squee like a teenager) Blink 182, Dallon knows he’s been officially adopted into the circle of trust.

Still, he doesn’t quite know what to expect when Zack corners him alone in their green room after everyone else has already left the venue (he swears next time he’s not going to let Brendon con him into last shower).

“I don’t know what you said to B and Spence,” he says, halfway out the door already, hand gripping the frame, “but thanks.”

Dallon’s startled into silence for a moment before his infamous tongue threatens to get him in trouble again.“Ross,” Dallon says, before Zack can walk away, “he did more than just beat the crap out of Brendon, didn’t he?”

Zack’s fingers tighten around the door frame. Dallon figures that’s the only answer he’s going to get as Zack turns away completely. His answer surprises him.

“Yes,” he says, and waits for Dallon to catch up. “Now get to the bus before we leave without you.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is officially the story that never ends. I wanted to post something, though, because it's been such a long time since I updated. This chapter is kind of short, though, because these were the only parts I had in chronological order. I've kind of been writing this story out of order (I've had the last scene of the story written for two months now). But there is so much of this story left. Like seriously, there are about 14 scenes left after this chapter. Also, smut is not my forte, but I tried. There's much more smut to come in the next part, too.

He’s late, so, so late.

He got lost in the music, the way the beat appeared as burnt orange and verdant green this time, the colors pulsating with the rhythm in his head. Words swirled around him, sometimes too fast to make out, but sometimes just slow enough that he could see them, pull out the ones he liked best and arrange them into a sentence. Perhaps right before sound check was not the best time to work on a new song, but the idea had struck and he couldn’t let it go, couldn’t not work on it right in that moment before he lost it for good.

It made him five minutes late for sound check.

His chest aches as he runs through the venue, hands shaking as one of the techs passes him his guitar. He stutters out an apology to his band as he walks on stage, and runs through sound check on autopilot. Spencer keeps asking him if there’s anything he wants to change before tonight’s performance, but it’s like someone stuck their entire fist into his head and squeezed his brain.

“It’s fine,” Brendon keeps repeating. “Whatever you want is fine.”

He can feel Spencer’s eyes boring into his back, but he doesn’t turn around to meet his gaze. Spencer can’t know.

He’s going to be mad, so, so mad at Brendon.

He hides in the bathroom after sound check, hyperaware of how many dangerous objects are in there. Anything could be a weapon. Ryan once pushed him so hard, Brendon clipped his shoulder on the edge of the sink. He couldn’t raise his arm above his head for days, and almost, almost broke down and asked Zack to take him to an Urgent Care center the second day. Ultimately, he kept it to himself because he knew Zack was starting to get suspicious. Another time, Ryan purposefully smashed the fingers of his right hand in a stall door. He stuttered out a lie to Zack about shutting his own fingers in the bus door accidentally. Zack iced his fingers and wrapped them, but they were still stiff and painful for the concert that night.

As far as objects went, though, the bathroom was much safer for him, he found out after many trials and errors, than most of the other places in a venue. Plus, kneeling on the floor of the bathroom while giving head, or getting fucked over a sink or the toilet, provided more privacy and hurt significantly less than kneeling out back of the venue (never again after he had to pull glass out of his knees that one time), or having a chair, or desk, or broom handle digging into his hips. It was a good place to hide away from everyone and pull himself together after Ryan was done, too.

The door squeaks open. Heavy footfalls draw near, sending his heart racing faster than a caged feral dog’s. It makes it hard to breathe. Brendon drops to his knees so quickly, he hears his bones _crack_ against the tile.

Ryan likes it when he’s prepared.

He waits for the first blow, or for Ryan to drag him to his feet and bend him over the sink.

But nothing happens. That’s never a good sign.

Cautiously, he peaks his eyes open just a slit, sees Spencer on his knees a few feet away. _Spencer is safe,_ his mind supplies. _Spencer would never hurt him? Right?_ He falls backward and scoots away from Spencer until his back hits the wall. “I’m sorry I was late. I was working on something. Don’t tell Ryan,” he says, wrapping his arms around his chest.

“It’s okay,” Spencer says, drawing the words out. “He can’t hurt you anymore. You’re safe.”

Safety is an illusion. He’s never safe, never. Ryan will always find him no matter where he hides.

“He’s not here, B. He’s gone, and he’s never coming back, okay? Breathe with me, just like Andy taught you,” Spence says, exaggerating his movements as he inhales like a yoga instructor teaching his students the proper technique.  _Ryan’s not here,_ he reminds himself as he mimics Spencer's movements.  _“No one here is going to hurt you,”_ Zack had said at the start of the tour, though some days it’s harder to believe than others. “Can I come closer now?” Spencer asks, after Brendon takes several more breaths to calm down, scooting closer when Brendon nods his assent.

He’d forgotten for just a moment where he was.

He hates how often that happens. “Sorry,” he says, as Spencer presses up against his side, tugging on his shoulder until Brendon rests his head on him.

“Not your fault,” Spencer insists. 

“It’s just…”

“You don’t have to explain it to me, B,” Spencer says. His blue eyes almost glow under the fluorescent lights, his hair soft and silky though he doesn’t even try. Time and space and freedom is starting to polish the jagged corners of the rough edges left behind by Ryan’s cruelty, and Spencer’s smile is more carefree for it, more freely and openly given. Even when he thought he was in love with Ryan, Brendon loved Spencer’s smile, and that he was one of the few people to ever have the real one directed towards him. Brendon likes his beard the way it is now too, kept short and neatly trimmed, unlike that mountain man, ZZ Top wannabe fur creature he had growing on his face before. And...

“I like your beard,” Brendon blurts out to stop the flow of thoughts.

Spencer’s face is so close to his that he feels the huff of laughter breeze across his cheek.

“I like your hair like that.”

It’s involuntary the way his face twitches into a smile, but it’s not unwelcome. He’s always noticed how handsome Spencer is. It’s fact, like the polar bear was the largest bear on Earth, or like Jupiter had rings. But right now it’s hitting him like an elbow in the ribs from that drunken friend who doesn’t know their own strength.

It takes his breath away.

“I meant what I said in the hospital,” he says, hears Spencer’s sharp inhale. “Can I kiss you?”

Their lips are so close he can feel it when Spencer’s tongue darts out to lick his own lips. “Only if it’s something you really want.”

“I want,” Brendon says, before closing the space between them. Their lips barely touch, but Spencer makes no move to deepen the kiss. It’s nice, Brendon thinks, being in control for once, so he does deepen the kiss, presses his lips harder, latches onto Spencer’s shirt. Spencer’s hand comes up to rest on the back of his head, fingers playing with the hair on the nape of his neck. But Spencer doesn’t pull him forward, doesn’t hold his head in place, doesn’t try to force this on him. It’s sweet and chaste, and exactly the kind of balm he needs to soothe the roughened pieces inside of him.

“Are you two making out on the bathroom floor?” Dallon interrupts, though Brendon never heard the door squeak open. “Do you know how many germs are probably on that floor? Like the rhinovirus, or dog vomit mold, or herpes. And if one person gets sick, you know that crap gets passed around. This floor probably hasn’t been cleaned for decades.”

“Then I could very well be sitting in jizz left over from Axl Rose, or Freddie Mercury, or David Bowie and you’re ruining it for me,” Brendon replies, flipping Dallon the bird. Spencer presses a smile into his neck.

“I can see my sage advice is not wanted here,” Dallon primly says with a wink, before backing out the door. “Guys,” Brendon can hear his say as the door swings shut. “You seriously suck at hide and seek. I found them again. They’re being gross.”

“Are you ready to go back out there?” Spencer asks after Dallon’s voice fades away.

“No,” he says, resting his head back on Spencer’s shoulder. Over the muffled sounds of chatter, and the drip from the leaky faucet, he can hear Blink 182 taking the stage for their sound check. Each member of the band has their own bus, a posse that follows them around like puppies, and a label that does _their_ bidding. It’s intimidating, to think he shares a stage with them each night, that that is actually his life. He should be ecstatic, should be reveling in the enormity of his success. Instead he’s hiding in a dirty bathroom.  “Can I ask you something?” he says, waits for Spencer to say okay, before asking, “How did you get over it after Ryan raped you?”

Spencer flinches, his arm around Brendon’s shoulders tightening. “He didn’t,” Spencer stutters out, and then sighs. They’d had this conversation before. Somewhere along the line Spencer either down played the enormity of what Ryan put him through in his head, or simply never realized it for what it was. “It was hard,” he finally admits. “There were times where I just didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. I was miserable. I hated myself, I hated Ryan, I hated life. Then my mother _made_ me talk to Ryan, and then I hated her for not noticing, for making me do that. I wanted to run away. I just wanted to stop thinking about it, so I stole a bunch of aunt’s anti-depressants, took way too many at once, and started puking my guts up. I passed out on the bathroom floor not knowing if I was going to wake up the next morning,” Spencer quietly admits.

Brendon smothers his gasp in Spencer’s shirt, feels his chest ache. He hadn’t realized it’d been that bad for Spencer. “What happened next?”

“I woke up, looked in the mirror, and hated what I saw. And I knew I couldn’t keep living like that. So I started doing research on the internet, and the library, reading advice for other people who’d been in a similar situation, and they helped me realize I couldn’t let what Ryan had done ruin my life. I shouldn’t stop being happy, stop trying to live my life because of what happened.”

“You realized it just like that and changed?” Brendon asked, not sarcastic in the least, just curious. He’s been telling himself every day ‘to just be happy, goddamnit, and be grateful for the things you still have.’ It just makes him feel worse when he can’t.

“No,” Spencer admits, “it was a process, and it often felt like I took 10 steps back for every step I took forward. Some days I’d wake up and be completely normal and happy, and the next day I’d be right back to being miserable. It didn’t help that I was constantly stuck in Ryan’s presence. But I think, the most important thing I learned was that I had to stop being so hard on myself all the time. That I did say yes at first, but I couldn’t have known what was going to happen, and it’s Ryan’s fault for not stopping when I asked him to, not mine. I just had to tell myself that every day until I finally started to believe it. Then I met you,” Spencer says, squeezing Brendon’s shoulder, “and then not long after, we got signed. And for the first time in a long time, I had something to look forward to, something to focus on that wasn’t what happened. It was easier after that to, not let it go, but not let it control my thoughts and actions so much.”

There’s a round of applause, audible even from their hiding spot, as Blink 182 finishes up their sound check. Blink 182’s posse is a bunch of brown-nosing suck ups, Brendon thinks, which is how they probably found themselves on the tour. Brendon wraps his arm around Spencer’s waist, turns his head so their noses are just inches apart.

Spencer meets his eyes, licks his lips again, a sigh catching in his throat. “You never really get over it,” he admits, “not completely. But you can learn to move on.”  

“I’m sorry.”

Pete bursts into the door before Spencer can ask what for, for which Brendon is very grateful. Brendon raises an eyebrow at Pete’s narrowed eyes, which widen in surprise when he sees the two of them on the floor. “That lying sack of shit. I’m gonna punch that giant fucker in the nuts,” Pete says, before hurrying out the door.

A second later they hear Dallon say, “Wait, wait! I didn’t lie! I never said that! Don’t—” before it breaks off into an undignified shriek.

“Thank you, Andy,” he hears Pete say.

“Our friends are weird,” Spencer says.

“We’re not exactly the poster children for normal,” Brendon points out.

“Never said it was a bad thing.”

*

He wants this, he thinks, Spencer leaning over him, knees bracketing his hips, hands on either side of his head, lip caught between his teeth. Brendon runs his hands under Spencer’s shirt, teasing the sensitive skin on his sides. A sea of baby blue roams over his chest, devouring the details of Brendon’s naked skin.

“I want you,” Spencer says, tracing a hand down Brendon’s face to his neck. “And I’m going to take what’s mine no matter what you want,” he says, his voice shifting, hand tightening around Brendon’s neck before he can utter a word in protest.

He’s on his knees, face pressed into blankets that smell like sex, and beer, and blood that’s all his own. Somehow he knows it’s Ryan that’s behind him and not Spencer pinning him down by the wrists. Pain radiates down his right arm, making it hard to think, hard to struggle when a fist grabs the waist of his jeans and yanks them down. He tries to resist, but his body refuses to move, and nothing comes out when he opens his mouth.  He squeezes his eyes shut as he hears Ryan’s zipper, dread gnawing at his stomach like acid that burns up the back of his throat.

His cringes, skin crawling where Ryan is touching it. He wishes he could take a lighter to his skin, burn the feeling of his hands away.

He’d beg for this to end, but he knows it’s useless.

“ _Brendon_ ,” his name rolls sharply off someone’s tongue. It doesn’t sound like Ryan. “ _Bren, wake up_.”

He jerks awake, eyes flying open, left arm striking out and smacking something warm and solid. His right arm is trapped under him, aching from the awkward angle. His body trembles with the terror that clings to him.

“Shit,” someone hisses. It sounds awfully similar to Spencer.  

“Sorry,” Brendon says, before he’s even fully cognizant. He hit someone, he’s aware enough to realize that. It was an accident, but his body tenses despite the shaking, bracing for retaliation.

“No, it’s my fault,” the voice, definitely Spencer, says. “I knew I shouldn’t have stood so close.”

“There’s not a whole lot of space for you to stand elsewhere,” Brendon points out, his bunk coming into focus as he blinks himself awake.

“True,” Spencer says, resting his head atop his fist on Brendon’s bunk. Somehow, Brendon had gotten stuck with a top bunk instead of a middle bunk. This was the last time _that_ ever happens. “You were having a nightmare.”

“Yeah,” Brendon says, but doesn’t elaborate. They both know what he was dreaming of. The images are hazy, but the terror, it was real, he felt it that day and every night all over again. It never really went away, lurked like a lioness hunting her prey in the back of his mind.

“I can make coffee if you want. I made Zack get Redbull earlier, so there’s that too. We could watch a movie in the back lounge. Ian’s sleeping there right now, but we can wake his dumbass up and send him back to his bunk. I made Zack get us new movies while he was out, or I could set up the Xbox.”

Despite the situation, a smile spreads across Brendon’s face. It’s sweet what Spencer is willing to do for him, that he’d sacrifice what little precious time of sleep that is afforded to them just to comfort Brendon. “No,” Brendon says, grasping Spencer’s arm and tugging. “Just, stay with me, here. Please?”

“Of course,” Spencer says, his momentary surprise giving way to a fond smile, as he crawls into Brendon’s bunk. There’s not a whole lot of room from mattress to ceiling, but there is just enough width to fit two fully grown men. They both lie on their sides facing one another, Brendon’s top hand curled in Spencer’s white t-shirt, and Spencer’s on Brendon’s hip, rubbing circles into his bare skin. “Did I ever tell you about the time my mother thought she lost one of the twins when they were both standing right next to her?”

“No,” he says, a huff of laughter escaping from his lips. He’s met Ginger many times, and he loves her dearly, but the women can be a bit scatterbrained at times.  

“We were on vacation in California, at some beach. I don’t remember the name of it now,” Spencer says. He lets the sound of Spencer’s voice wash over him, and lull him back to sleep.

*

Spencer knew he shouldn’t have left Brendon to his own devices in their music room while working on new music. When he gets back from grabbing takeout, one of the amps is emitting high-frequency static, there’s crumpled and torn pieces of paper littered across the ground (though admittedly only some of that is new from when he left), the keyboard is on its side, and Brendon’s Epiphone acoustic guitar is lying on one of the chairs with a broken string curling towards him like it’s asking for help, begging for Spencer to save it from Brendon’s rampage.

It’d been weeks since the tour with Blink 182 and Fall Out Boy ended. Brendon had spent most of the time holed up in the music room, muttering to himself and picking out melodies on his guitar or keyboard. He hadn’t shown Spencer any of it, was reluctant even to hand over the sheet music he’d been working on, and downright refused to show Spencer any potential lyrics.

Spencer wasn’t worried about getting a new CD out, he knew it would happen one way or another. And he wasn’t worried about whether or not people would buy it. There was a plethora of crap on the market that people gobbled up like a Thanksgiving turkey, and lauded like it was the greatest music to bless their ears, when in actuality it was total, utter shit. Their music was bound to sound  better than that.

No, Spencer was much more worried about whether or not Brendon believed that.

“It’s crap,” Brendon says, throwing the sheet music in his hands onto the ground. “It’s all crap. Ryan and Jon were right I can’t do this.”

“Brendon,” he says, careful not to get too close as he abandons the takeout next to the guitar. “It’s not crap. You’ve been writing music for years –”

“Just silly little ditties,” Brendon insists. Spencer wishes Zack had kicked Ryan in the balls instead of punching him in the face. He wonders, if Spencer called him right now, if Zack would go do it for him. Or maybe Andy would. With the way he kept staring during the last tour, Spencer knew Andy knew more than he was told about the entire situation. Andy wasn’t a violent person, but he was like a German Shepherd, fiercely protective of the ones he cared about. He wonders if he could get one of them to kick Jon in the balls, too. In the later stages of the last tour the four of them were on, Jon had taken his cue from Ryan and had not been kind to Brendon in interviews. It was subtle, but noticeable even to fans paying attention. They were never kind about Brendon’s contributions to either CD (like Jon had room to talk, he wasn’t even there for Fever), and sometimes liked to pretend they wrote Pretty Odd by themselves.

“According to Ryan,” Spencer argues.

“And Jon,” Brendon unhelpfully adds.

Spencer ignores him. “You know the only reason Ryan said that was to mess with your head, because he wanted you to feel dependent on him, like you needed him so you would never leave him, or argue with him.”

“I know. I know,” Brendon says, covering his face with his hands and collapsing to the ground into a crouch. “That doesn’t make him wrong.”

“Are our fans wrong?” Spencer asks, kneeling in front him. He grabs Brendon’s wrist and gently pulls it away from his face. “They love our music. They love _Fever_ and _Pretty Odd,_ and I know Ryan didn’t write either of those by himself.  I was there, I know. You and Ryan pretty much wrote _Fever_ by yourselves.”

“But, the lyrics,” Brendon argues, but relaxes from his crouch, and sits on the floor instead.

“You just need to find your voice,” Spencer says. “You think Pete learned to write lyrics in a day? Of course not. It’ll take time, but it’ll happen, you just can’t give up. It’s okay to ask for help too, you know.”

“What did I do to deserve you?” Brendon asks, reversing Spencer’s hold on his wrist, so they’re holding hands instead.

“Nothing,” Spencer heatedly insists. “It doesn’t work like that. Besides, I’m not that great.”

“But better than you think,” Brendon says, squeezing his hand.

“And so are you,” Spencer says.

“Thanks, I…I…” Brendon says, gaze searching around the room, settling on the guitar, and the keyboard, and papers littered everywhere. 

“Tell me what to do,” Spencer says. Brendon’s spent so much of the last two years of his life being controlled, he needs that push to make his own decisions again.

“Wanna learn how to restring a guitar,” he says with a wry grin, but a self-deprecating laugh.

Spencer hides his wince. “And then what?” he says.

“I’ve got this idea, well two ideas. I was thinking they could work together. Maybe if you could listen, and tell me what you think of them together? I’ve got an idea for lyrics for it, well just a sentence really.”

“That’s all you need,” Spencer encourages. “Everything starts from just an idea.”

“Okay,” Brendon says, resting his forehead against Spencer’s.

“We can do this, B. We’re gonna be okay.”

*

“That’s it, I’m calling break time,” Spencer says, setting his sticks on top of his drum, and giving Brendon his best pointed stare. He’d watched Brendon wince and grimace his way through the same melody for the last half an hour now, and he was all for pushing themselves to ‘reach new heights, to excel, and get the album the fuck done,’ as Brendon’s inner self guru had been prone to saying these last few week. He was glad Brendon had at least found some confidence in his musical abilities (Spencer thinks he has Pete to think for that). It was still forced, though, and downright artificial at times, so they utilized the real confidence when it struck. But enough was enough, and they’d officially went from hiking up that mountain to get their songs done to reach the elusive top, a finished album, to ‘I’ve pushed myself so hard, I’m dangling from the edge of a cliff and I don’t know how to get back on the mountain.’

It was not pleasant.

“But, but, but,” Brendon protests. “It’s really starting to come together, and they’re expecting a demo soon and—”

“No buts,” Spencer says, prying Brendon’s Fender from stiff fingers. “Put it down,” he says, refusing to acknowledge how much he just sounded like his mother. “You’re pushing yourself too hard. We need a break.”

He tugs on Brendon’s right wrist, and Brendon stifles a gasp, illustrating Spencer’s point.

“Fuck, fine. Jesus,” Brendon says, pulling his wrist to his chest and rubbing the aching joint.

“Here, let me,” Spencer says, grabbing the arm again, and massaging the joint. Andy taught him this technique for massaging his wrists during his first ever tour because drumming was a tough occupation on the joints. “I know a thing or two about sore wrists.”

“From all the masturbating you did as a teen?” Brendon says, snorting at his own joke. “You walked right into that one,” he responds to Spencer’s glare.  

“Shut up, douchenozzle. I’m trying to be a good boyfriend here,” Spencer says as he kneads the tight muscles, enjoying the groan of pleasure from Brendon that zings through him, heading straight down to pool low and heated in his stomach. He shifts slightly, settles his ass on the floor, pulling one knee to his chest.

“Spencer,” Brendon says, something slightly off about his voice.

“Hmm,” Spencer replies, not taking his eyes of the wrist that feels tiny in his too large hands.

“Spencer,” Brendon repeats, and there’s something in his voice that has Spencer’s eyes shooting up to look at him. _Oh,_ he thinks, and has just enough time to drop the wrist in his hands before Brendon pounces, latching his lips onto Spencer’s.

“This is okay, right?” Brendon asks as he pulls away, settling his weight in Spencer’s lap.

“I mean I’m not gonna say no,” is Spencer’s lighthearted response. “But seriously, as long as this –”

“I know,” Brendon interrupts, shaking his head fondly at his boyfriend, “as long as this is something I want to do, and not something I feel  I have to. I want…this is something I want to try, and if I can’t…”

“We’ll stop the moment you ask me to,” Spencer says.

“Good,” Brendon says, and pushes on Spencer’s should until he’s resting his back against his drums. Brendon kisses him again, swipes his tongue across Spencer’s lips. He opens up to him, lets their tongues dance together like the wet slide of an exotic dancer on a strip pole.

“Can I?” Brendon asks when they come up for air, his eyes darting down to the bulge in Spencer’s jeans.

Spencer’s tongue is still twisted from the kiss, so he frantically nods instead. Brendon pulls his jeans and boxers down, leaves them bunched against his thighs.

The first touch to Spencer’s member is hesitant, unsure. He waits it out, remains still. Let’s Brendon decide what to do next. It’s a whisper of touch at first, barely more than a breeze, then Brendon licks his hand, and firmly grasps his erection, and _holy shit,_ Spencer was not expecting that.

He throws his head back and it bounces of his drum with a _thump,_ an obscene moan emanating from his throat. It’s been a long time since someone besides him touched his dick. The callouses on Brendon’s hand catch on  the head with every jack of Brendon’s hand. The tempo Brendon set is slow, unhurried, but Spencer knows he’s not going to last long, now that the moment he’s been imagining for five years is finally here.

“Wait, wait,” he says, with Herculean effort.

Brendon frowns down at him, and pulls away immediately .

“I want to,” he pants, “can I?” he asks, gesturing to Brendon’s own erection, hoping it’s enough to get the message across.

“Yes,” Brendon says, but looks confused.

Spencer frees his dick, spits in his hand, lines up their erections, and wraps his hands around both of them. Brendon bites off a gasp, curls forward in on himself, his hands tightening in the lapels of Spencer’s shirt, as he buries his face into Spencer’s shoulder.

He stamps down the feeling Brendon’s reaction gives him, and focuses on making this good for both of them. Coaxing Brendon’s head away from his shoulder, he kisses Brendon again, and increases the movement of his hand, stopping every couple of thrusts to swipe the callous of his thumb around the head of Brendon’s erection.   He swallows Brendon’s gasps every time he does so, revels in their existence.

“Let me know when you’re getting close,” Spencer says, shifting his hips so Brendon’s more firmly sitting in his lap. Brendon falls forward a little, catches himself on the drum, as their dicks slide together.

Spencer hisses between his teeth, squeezes their cocks a bit accidentally, before resuming the movement of his hand, quicken the pace until they’re both panting in the shared air between them.

“Oh shit, oh fuck,” Spencer says when Brendon tentatively slides his hands under his shirt, smoothing across his stomach before swiping across his nipples. Spencer shifts his grip so he’s taking more of Brendon into his hand, and receives a soft, cut-off moan in response.

“If you keep that up, I’m gonna come all over you,” he trails off, biting his lip as Spencer rubs the slit of his erection again.

“Yeah? Want you to,” Spencer says.

“Really?” Brendon asks. Spencer feels a stab of anger towards Ryan in his chest, but stamps it down, and shelves the issue to address with Brendon later.

“Do it,” Spencer says.

“S-shit, S-spenc-cer,” Brendon says, getting stuck on the sibilance. “Your name needs less, oh fuck,” he says.

Spencer comes first, spurting come across his hand and Brendon’s lap. He uses his come as lube, and jerks off Brendon faster. Brendon bites his lip, squeezes his eyes shut tight, and comes.

“I…”

“Yeah…”

*

“I want to go on a date,” Spencer announces as he walks into Brendon’s kitchen one morning. He’s kind of, sort of, mostly living in Brendon’s spare bedroom.

The CD is going nowhere fast. They’ve made about 10 songs, only 3 or 4 of which they actually like, and Brendon’s cycled through ‘we can do this!’ to ‘this is crap, and I can’t do anything right,’ so many times, Spencer’s starting to get dizzy. They need a break, from the studio, from the ever present cloud that hangs over their heads whenever they pick up their instruments and try to write, and from the sadness, and fear, and anxiety that has plagued them far longer than the night Ryan sent Brendon to the hospital.

They need some friggin joy in their lives, goddammit.

“A date?” Brendon asks, setting his coffee mug on the counter, and spinning it around on its axis, a sure sign he’s nervous as fuck.

“A date, you know, out in public. Where there’s people,” he says, but quickly amends, “we don’t have to make it known to ‘the public’ that we are on a date, if you don’t want to. But I want to go out and have fun. With you. In public. On a date.”

Brendon crowds into his space, his eyes crinkled in amusement .“I would love to go on a date with you, in public, where there’s people,” he says.

“Shut up,” Spencer says, his cheeks burning.

“Can I hold your hand where there’s people, in public?” Brendon asks.

“I would like that very much,” Spencer says, swallows thickly when Brendon leans forward, wraps his arms around Spencer’s waist.

“Can I kiss you in public?” Brendon asks, pressing their lips together, and thrusting his tongue into Spencer’s mouth. The kiss is hot, and wet, and dirty, and anyone watching would not be able to misinterpret the intent. "Like that?"

“Anything you want,” Spencer says.

Brendon pulls back, studies his face for a moment, before sliding under Spencer’s arm and settling into his side. “Awesome. So, where are you taking me on this date, in public, where’s there people?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Oh no,” Brendon says. “That’s not how this works. You asked _me_ that means you have to surprise me.”

“Oh really?”

“Yeah, just make sure it’s in public, where there’s people,” he teases with a laugh.

Spencer tickles Brendon’s sides in retaliation, earning a startled yelp and an honest to god giggle. “All right, all right,” Brendon concedes. “We tell no one about the giggle.”

“If we tell no one about my pathetic attempts to ask you on a date?”

“Deal,” Brendon says, sealing it with a firm handshake.

Spencer agonizes about where to take Brendon for days. He even calls Pete who recommends a posh, new restaurant opening up near Mulholland Drive. It’s probably a hipster joint. Spencer hates hipsters. They’re annoying as fuck. But he doesn’t have a better idea, so he takes Brendon there.

It’s definitely a hipster joint. The décor looks like it came straight out of a thrift shop or someone’s grandmother’s attic, complete with velvet booths that are a garish shade of purple and dark mahogany tables set against paisley painted walls. The hostess has glasses like Brendon’s, her hair up in a ponytail, and an attitude that stretches for miles. Incense burns on each table, and there are pictures of poorly drawn animals on the wall above each booth. Spencer would think this a joke by Pete if it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing Pete loved.

“So, what do you do for a living?” Brendon says, resting his head in his hands like Shirley Temple and batting his eyes after the waiter seats them.

“What are you doing?” Spencer asks with a frown.

“Asking the awkward questions customary of a first date,” Brendon replies.

“This was a bad idea, wasn’t it?” Spencer says, slumping down into the garish purple booth which sinks almost to the floor with his weight.

“No,” Brendon says. “No,” he insists when Spencer shoots him his ‘I don’t believe a thing coming out of your mouth’ look. “I’m just not very good at, you know, dating.”

“Me either,” Spencer says. The silence that settles over them is so stifling and all-consuming, it’s a relief when their waiter comes over to take their drink order.

“So, how are your sisters?” Brendon asks, after the waiter leaves.

“You tell me. You talk to them more than I do. I think Jackie still has a crush on you. It’s going to break her fragile heart when I tell her we’re dating.”

“You can tell her, you know, tell your family if you want,” Brendon says, as he rearranges his silverware on the table, and fiddles with his knife.

Spencer filters through several responses in his mind, including ‘really,’ and ‘of course,’ and ‘I’ll call my mother right now,’ and discards them all. He settles on, “if I can get a word in edgewise the next time my mother calls. She will be ecstatic. I’ll never get another word in again.” His attempt to lighten the mood falls flat when all Brendon does is nod and stare down at his plate.

Brendon rearranges his silverware again, before tapping a beat against the table with his finger. “Did I tell you my sister is pregnant again?”

“Yeah, I was there when she called," he said, resisting the urge to bounce his leg along to the rhythm Brendon is tapping out.  “Let’s get out of here. This _was_ a bad idea.”

Spencer slides out from the booth, offers his hand to Brendon, and pulls him to his feet. “But, I mean,” Brendon takes a deep breath. “I want to go on a date with you. It’s not a bad idea.”

“I don’t mean the date,” he hastily adds, because the look on Brendon’s face is downright heartbreaking. “I mean this restaurant was a bad idea. I should have never taken advice from Pete.”

“Yeah, Pete loves this kind of shit,” Brendon says, his face shifting to show his relief.

“Let’s go go-karting, or go someplace like Dave and Busters, or I don’t know,” Spencer says.

“Why don’t we drive Mulholland Drive and stop at all the scenic pull-offs until we find a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that’ll either be the greatest food in the world, or give us diarrhea?” Brendon suggests.

“I thought you wanted to be surprised?” Spencer jokes, pulling out his wallet and throwing down some money for the drinks they never touched.

“Yeah, well, then I saw what your ideas of a date were and I changed my mind,” Brendon said, bumping their shoulders together.

“I overthought it too much,” Spencer said, holding the door to the restaurant open for Brendon. “I mean, for fuck’s sake, I’ve seen you in pretty much every embarrassing situation possible. I don’t need to impress you.”

“Gee, way to make a guy feel special,” Brendon says, rolling his eyes.

“I mean, I,” Spencer says, grabbing Brendon's hand to keep him from walking away.  

“Kidding, I was kidding, Spence,” Brendon says, interlacing their hands.

-

“I didn’t mean we had to stop at every single scenic pull-off,” Brendon says, but he’s laughing as Spencer places the car into park. They’ve been on Mulholland Drive for hours, and ate at a restaurant that looked like a gas station on the outside, and like it belonged to home of a lead singer of a hair band in the 80’s on the inside, complete with leopard print chairs. Spencer couldn’t tell what the food was supposed to be, but it tasted good at least. Instead of the awkward first time date questions, they one upped each other on dirty jokes, and played the “I spy something like that looks like a penis or vagina” version of the game, until they were laughing so hard, the few other patrons stared at them funny.

“Just one more,” Spencer says, climbing from the car.

Night is falling across the city, and from their perch on the mountain they can see the lights of the city clustered across the valley below them, the sun setting over the horizon just beyond that. He snaps a picture of Brendon striking a pose, before joining him on the cliff’s edge.

“I think selfie’s are stupid,” Spencer says, “but want to take one, you know, as something to remember tonight by?”

Brendon shakes his head with a laugh. “Of course you big cheeseball,” he says.

“Says the cheesemaker,” Spencer grumbles, wrapping an arm around Brendon’s shoulder and pulling him close. As the flash goes off, Brendon surprises him by pressing a kiss into his cheek.

It’s still Spencer’s favorite picture to this day.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From here on out the timeline jumps forward a lot, and skips over large periods of time. I tried adding in a few dates as a reference and to make it less confusing. And again, smut is not my forte, but I tried. The story's almost done! Just one more chapter, maybe two depending on how long it takes me to finish everything that I want to get done with this story. I still can't believe how long this has gotten.

“I want to try blowing you,” Brendon says one night as they’re watching shitty late night tv while curled together on the couch.

Spencer’s dick goes from zero to interested quicker than a Camaro can hit sixty from nothing. Still, “Only if that’s something you really want to do, and not something you feel like you have to,” he says, twirling a piece of Brendon’s hair with his pointer finger.

“It’s something I really want to do. Just,” Brendon says, hesitating, before adding, “I don’t want to be on my knees on the ground while I do it.”

“Our bed’ll probably be more comfortable,” he agrees, trying to keep his anger at Ryan out of his voice.

“I want tie you up, too. Well, just your hands,” Brendon says.

“Okay,” Spencer easily agrees. It’s not his thing, but if it’s what Brendon wants, he’ll try it.

“It’s just…Ryan used to grab my hair and force my head still while he…”

“Hey,” he says, letting the piece of hair he was twirling in his hand fall, and massaging the back of Brendon’s neck instead. “You don’t have to worry about that with me. But if you want to tie my hands up to make yourself more comfortable, that’s completely okay. Whatever you need is fine,” Spencer encourages.

The light from the television flickers across Brendon’s face. The infomercial for some potato chip-making-useless accessory flips over to an equally useless all-in-one gym. Chuck Norris briefly appears, looking washed out and emaciated, to endorse the product, before some overly ripped and excessively tanned dude takes his place.

“Thanks,” Brendon whispers into his shirt.

“Mmm,” Spencer hums in reply.

“Want me to do something about that?” Brendon asks, pointing to the tent in Spencer’s pjs.

“No,” Spencer says, his cheeks flushing, as he shifts his hips away from Brendon. He feels Brendon’s huff of laughter ghost across his neck, before Brendon licks his hand and sticks it down Spencer’s pants, firmly grasping his erection. A kiss is pressed into his neck, Brendon’s breaths tickling his skin. “Sweet Jesus,” Spencer says. Give a guy a warning."  

"We really need to buy some lube," Brendon says.

"Yeah," is the only response Spencer can manage to stutter out as Brendon works his hand on Spencer's erection.

It doesn’t take long before he’s coming in his pants, because his body will never cease to respond to Brendon’s slightest touch.

*

Spencer completely forgets all about the conversation. 

Christmas comes and goes, and they spend it with their respective families, but not with each other, the separation harder than Spencer thought it would be. Then they tell the record company they _think_ they’re ready to start recording soon-ish, which means weeks of boring meetings. They also meet with Butch Walker, who Brendon is absolutely fawning over, in hopes the man will produce their new CD.

So when he walks into the house almost two months later to find Brendon sitting on the edge of the bed with two furry handcuffs attached to the bedpost, at first, he’s confused.

Until it hits him. _Oh,_ he thinks. “Oh, you …”

“If you don’t want to … ” Brendon says, fidgeting more than usual.

“No, it’s not that. Just, I’d forgotten we talked about this, and … are you sure you really want to try this?”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, Spence. I’m sure,” he says, but with a shrug, and a frown on his face that isn’t all that convincing.

“B,” he says, taking a seat next to him.  “We can always stop at any time, but you have to be 100 percent sure about this. You can’t just be kind of sure this is something you want. For you, not for me.”

“I want this to be for both of us. I want … I need this.”

“Okay. Then tie me up, cowboy. I’m all yours,” he says, pressing a quick kiss to the smile that erupts across Brendon’s face.

“Cowboy? Really? Is that _your_ secret porn fantasy?”

“Shut up, it just slipped out,” he says, pretending to be embarrassed, but secretly pleased with himself.

“Well then, get naked cowboy,” Brendon says, slapping Spencer on the ass. “Giddy-up.”

Spencer fondly shakes his head at his partner as he tosses his clothes on the floor, and settles on the bed, letting Brendon snap the cuffs around his wrists. He’s not surprised that Brendon keeps his clothes on. Being the biggest show off on the planet, Brendon is not embarrassed about his body, but it’s a control thing, Spencer thinks, a way of proving to himself he’s in charge of the situation. As much as he would love to see Brendon naked, he knows this is something his partner needs to feel comfortable.

“I, um … ” Brendon says, settling between Spencer’s legs, his nervousness apparent from the moon.

He tries to reach out for Brendon, but the cuffs pull tight reminding him of their presence. “Hey, it’s okay,” he reassures. “If you can’t do this, that’s completely fine, okay? Don’t force this on yourself.”

“No, it's not that, it’s just kind of awkward, isn’t it? I mean, there was no natural buildup to this, no foreplay. I mean, you’re not even hard yet. Should I just, you know?” he says, making a vague gesture towards Spencer’s dick.

Spencer does not, in fact, _know_. “Come here,” he says, his wrists pulling taut against the handcuffs again, as he makes another aborted attempt to reach for his boyfriend. He can understand now why Brendon insisted on the cuffs.

Brendon straddles his laps and intertwines his hands on the back of Spencer’s neck, letting their foreheads rest together. 

“Just take your time figuring it out. Experiment. Explore. Try new things until you find what feels right, or natural. That’s what this is all about, right? Figuring ourselves, and each other out?”

“You always know the right thing to say,” Brendon says, his breath hot on Spencer’s face.

“Or maybe you’ve just heard the wrong thing so many times that anything sounds good,” Spencer says, because he doesn’t think the things he says is all that great. It’s just the truth.

“Maybe,” Brendon says, before kissing him. It’s a little more than chaste, but not quite dirty as their lips move against each other. It’s slow, and sweet, and even when he opens his mouth to his boyfriend, feels Brendon’s tongue explore his mouth, it isn’t rushed or feel like it has to lead to anything more.

When Brendon pulls away, he gives his boyfriend a look he hopes is encouraging. Brendon hesitates for a moment, before leaving a trail of kisses down his neck and chest, lips barely caressing his skin and gently sucking on it before moving on. He swipes his tongue around his nipples, nips at the skin of his sides, teases the flesh of Spencer’s thighs with his tongue. By the time Brendon reaches his dick, he’s hard.

Brendon jacks his erection with his hand a few times, before tentatively licking it from base to tip. When he wraps his lips around the head, though,  pleasure rips through him like a bull in a china shop, and he throws his head back with a _thwack_ against the headboard.

“S-shit,” he hisses, as Brendon swipes his tongue along the slit and slowly slides his mouth down the shaft. Brendon looks up, meets his eyes, and he can’t look away, captivated by the question in his gaze. He’s not sure what that question is, though.

Before he has a chance to utter something encouraging or inspirational, Brendon slides all the way down, takes his entire length in his mouth, tearing a moan from somewhere deep in Spencer's chest.

“You don’t … you don’t have to,” he manages to pant, knowing how hard it is deep throat someone without gagging.

He can feel Brendon smile, lips stretched tight around his erection, before he bobs his head, painfully slow back up to the tip and down again.

“Oh, sweet Jesus, oh fuck,” Spencer says, as he fists his hands, and fights the urge to come already. He’s never been this turned on in his life before, and they’ve barely even started. But it’s Brendon this time.

It was always Brendon.

Brendon pulls up just as sinfully slow, running his tongue along the underside of his erection, sucking gently on the tip before going back down on him a little faster this time. Spencer digs his toes into the bed, his knees falling open wider as he fights the urge to buck up into the warm, wet heat wrapped around his erection.

Brendon’s eyes meet his again, as he starts bobbing his head faster this time, up and down, up and down, easily taking Spencer’s entire length in his mouth each time.

“Holy fuck,” Spencer says, when Brendon runs his tongue along the underside again, pulls up, stopping briefly to suck harder on the head, before going back down on him. He wants to watch, he really, really does. This is literally the hottest thing he’s even seen. But his eyes squeeze shut on their own accord, hands clenching and unclenching, sweat dripping down his brow.

He can feel the pressure in his groin cresting, building higher and higher, like pumping too much helium in a balloon until he feels like he’s going to burst. He holds off as long as he can, until Brendon swipes his tongue across the slit of his erection again, then goes down hard and fast, one of his knuckles finding Spencer’s perineum and massaging the sensitive skin.

“Wait, wait, I’m gonna … you might want to,” he barely manages to stutter out. Brendon scrapes the underside of his erection lightly with his teeth, before swallowing him whole, giving permission.

And yeah, Spencer’s done.

He comes so hard, he thinks his vision may have darkened for a moment. He’s panting, chest heaving, sweat dripping down his face, hands clenched so tightly they’re stiff when he tries to flex them.

“Holy shit,” he says, when he regains his breath, his eyes focusing on Brendon.

Brendon sits up on his haunches, eyes fixed on the bed. “How was that?” Brendon asks, uncertainty in his gaze when he finally looks up. Spencer simply cannot have that.

He hooks a leg around Brendon, jerks him forward hard enough that he falls into his lap. “That was the best damn blowjob I’ve ever had. And I mean it. Ever. I’m talking epic.”

“Are you satisfied, cowboy?” he asks in a ridiculous Southern accent, as he releases Spencer from the cuffs.

“Unbelievably so,” he says, and pounces, surging forward the minute he’s free to pin Brendon lightly to the bed. He runs one hand under Brendon’s shirt, lightly teasing the skin on the side he’s knows is ticklish. “Now let me return the favor.”

The way Brendon’s eyes widen when he pops open the button of his jeans is priceless.

*

(July, 2010)

The AP magazine lies discarded on the living room table, open to a picture of The Young Veins. Spencer’s hand hovers over the magazine before he picks it up, starts reading through it.

“ _Jon and I wrote_ Nine in the Afternoon,” Ryan says, and Spencer expects that kind of bullshit from him, but his hands still tighten on the magazine, until it starts to rip around the edges.

“ _I’m saying they would rather play someone else’s songs than to try to write their own_ ,” Jon says, and Spencer tears the magazine in half and throws it in the trash. What did Jon think he was doing the entire first year and a half he toured with Panic? Oh, that’s right, playing someone else’s songs. And did he think Ryan just wrote _Fever_ by himself, and that Spencer and Brendon, were what, just the lackey’s? _That little hypocritical fucktard,_ he thinks, slamming his foot into the garbage can.

He should have expected this from them, knew Ryan would find someone way to backstab and manipulate them, even from a distance. He should have known Ryan would find some way to make Brendon feel like shit still.

_Fuck,_ he thinks, and checks every room in the house. It’s completely empty, except for Bogart, who doesn’t even acknowledge Spencer’s presence. Belatedly he realizes Brendon’s car is gone. He calls Brendon’s phone three times in a row, and each time it goes straight to voicemail.  Who knows how long it’s been since his boyfriend read the article. Brendon could be anywhere by now.

He dives for his phone when it rings 20 minutes later after fruitlessly wandering around the house, trying to rack his brain where Brendon could go when distressed.

It’s not Brendon on the phone, but Pete that says, “Did you read the article?”

The noise that comes out of Spencer’s mouth is a cross between a growl and a chocked off yell that might have been the start of ‘Fuck those assholes.’

“I’ll take that as a yes. Did Brendon read it?”

“I think so,” Spencer manages to say, sitting down heavily in their living room chaise.

“How’s he handling it?”

“I don’t fucking know. I can’t find him. He’s was gone before I got home.”

“You don’t think he’d try to,” Pete says, swallows thickly, before adding, “hurt himself?”

“No,” Spencer says, though he’s only about 90 percent sure on that. “It’s nothing he hasn’t heard from either of them before.”

“That doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

“Yeah. Hey Pete,” he says, and stops, hearing Brendon’s car screech to a halt in the driveway. “I gotta go. I just heard Brendon pull in.” He throws his phone down, and waits eagerly by the door with Bogart. The minute Brendon walks through the door, he wraps his arms around him. “Thank fuck. It doesn’t mean anything, okay? They’re assholes, and they’re totally wrong.”

“I know,” Brendon says, melting into the hug after a moment.

“You don’t, you really don’t. But I’m going to keep telling you as many times as I have to until you do.”

*

(December 2010)

Spencer's starting to worry about the the fact that aside from the a few scattered dates here and there, and recording the album, the two of them have barely left Brendon's house in more than a year. The more time they spend holed up in his house, the worse it gets. He can't even get Brendon to leave the house to go grocery shopping, and he turned down an invite to go hang out with Pete, which worried Spencer more than anything else. With two days to Christmas there's no point in pressing the issue until they get back from Vegas, but he also knows this is something he can't leave unaddressed for long.  

He shifts the bags of takeout higher on his arm as he walks up Brendon's walkway, and shoves the key into the lock. He twists the handle, but nothing happens. Brendon’s door won’t budge.

_Fuck me,_ he thinks as he realizes Brendon must have bolted the door on accident. _Maybe he forgot I was coming right back?_

He calls Brendon, but doesn’t get an answer, so he sneaks around to the back, through the gate that Brendon always forgets to lock. The sliding glass back door that leads to the kitchen is almost never locked either. _Trust Brendon to deadbolt the front door and leave the back door completely open._

When he rounds the corner, his heart lurches in his chest. The back door is completely shattered, lying in large shards and tiny pieces that glitter in the sunlight across the concrete patio. He can just make out a muffled voice that sounds painfully familiar.

The takeout hits the ground with a thud, forgotten. He flattens his back against the white siding and slides his way towards the door. When he peaks through the now gaping hole in Brendon's house, his stomach clenches. Ryan has Brendon pinned against the counter, broken wine bottle in hand and pointed at Brendon’s throat. Brendon is bent backwards over the counter, knuckles white where he is gripping the granite.

“This is all your fault,” Ryan says, leaning his face in towards Brendon, who flinches, and turns his head away. “You ruined everything. Even Jon left me.” From this angle, Spencer can’t see much, but he can see Ryan moving his free arm, and hear the sound of his zipper. “You know what to do.” 

Spencer wants so badly to barge into the room, to tackle Ryan to the ground and give him a taste of his own medicine, to save Brendon from having to go through this again. But this situation has the potential to go south, very, very quickly. No matter how painful it is to turn away and leave his boyfriend all alone and unprotected, he ignores his first instinct and shuffles along the wall until he hopes he is out of earshot.

“I said get to it already!” he hears Ryan roar, as Spencer dials a number he hoped he’d never have to in his life. He squeezes his eyes shut, and presses his lips together when he hears the distinct sound of fleshing hitting flesh. He pounds his fist silently against the side of the house, and forces himself to stay still long enough to make this call.

“911, what’s your emergency?” hits his hears.

He lets go of the breath he was holding. “Someone broke into our home, and is attacking my boyfriend. Please send help,” he says shakily to the operator.

“We will send police to your location immediately,” the operator says. “Does the assailant have a weapon?”

“Just a broken wine bottle that I can tell,” he says.

“Is your boyfriend seriously hurt?”

“I…I don’t know,” he says, close to tears. He didn’t get a good look at Brendon. He prays Brendon hasn’t been alone with Ryan long enough to get hurt. “But I know he won’t hesitate to hurt my boyfriend.”

“I will dispatch an ambulance to your location as well. Are you inside or outside of the home?”

“Outside,” he says, sliding along the siding so he can get a better look as the noises from inside Brendon’s home become louder. He hears another sharp _slap,_ and flinches like it landed on his own cheek.

“Remain where you are until the police arrive with help,” the operator says.

He doesn’t even think about it, just says, “No, I have to help him,” before tossing his cellphone. The glass _crunches_ beneath his feet as he approaches, drawing Brendon’s attention, but not Ryan’s.

Ryan and Brendon are still locked in the same tableau, except now Brendon’s cheek is bright red, and from this angle he can see Ryan’s dick swinging freely.  He briefly meets Brendon’s gaze, before searching around the shattered door for something heavy.

“Why are you being so fucking difficult?” Ryan asks, pressing the broken wine bottle into Brendon’s neck hard enough to draw a thin line of blood. “Just get to it already. It’s the only thing you’re good for after all.”

Brendon remains completely still, except for the slight hitch in his breath when Ryan raises his free hand to slap him again.

“Don’t,” Spencer says, reaching an arm out as if to touch him. His plan was to grab something heavy, and knock Ryan out, but the words escape him before he can even react. “Leave him alone.”

“Spencer,” Ryan says, his face shifting from a sneer into something akin to relief. Now that’s he’s close enough, Spencer can see how blown out his eyes are, the black of his pupil nearly swallowing the irises, and his hands are shaking so badly, it’s almost spasmodic. It’s a miracle he didn’t slice Brendon’s neck open.

Ryan pulls away from Brendon and throws his arms out wide as he approaches Spencer. It takes him a moment to realize Ryan wants a hug. He contemplates evading, but decides to let Ryan touch him in hopes he can distract him long enough for Brendon to escape. The wine bottle is cold and sharp against his back when Ryan wraps his long arms around him. Spencer doesn’t return the hug. He locks eyes with Brendon instead, and makes a shooing motion with his hands, trying to get Brendon to make a run for it.

Brendon shakes his head, mouths something that looks like ‘I’m not leaving you,’ maybe. Spencer frowns, and makes a more aggressive shooing motion. ‘Called 911,’ he mouths back to Brendon. ‘Go.’

He’s fairly confident Ryan won’t hurt him on purpose. As sick and twisted as it may be, Ryan still loves him. On accident, though, that is another story.

Brendon points to the skillet, hanging on a hook a few feet to his left, but Spencer shakes his head no. _Let me deal with this,_ he wants to scream. _Just get out of here._

To his great relief, Brendon starts sliding along the counter, moving slowly so as not to alert Ryan. But Ryan lets go suddenly, pulls back and places both hands on Spencer’s shoulders with a frown. “You’re not happy to see me,” he says, almost pouts like a child throwing a tantrum. “This is your fault,” Ryan says, twirling around faster than Spencer can react, and stabbing at Brendon with the broken piece of glass.

Brendon throws himself back in time to avoid the stab, but trips and loses his balance. As he falls, Ryan swipes at him again with the bottle, and Brendon throws his arm up just in time to protect his face. The sharp edges of the glass slice across Brendon’s skin, cutting in to the tender flesh of his forearm from wrist to elbow before skittering off into thin air. Blood immediately starts to pour down his arm, splashing against the cream tiles, as Brendon scampers backwards away from Ryan’s next attack.

_Shit, shit, what do I do?_ he thinks, looking wildly around the room for the answer. He grabs the closest item and throws it at Ryan’s back. It’s nothing more than a coffee mug, and it bounces of Ryan’s back like a pen on paper.

But it gets his attention. 

“Um … uh,” he says as Ryan advances. He matches every step forward with his own back until he hits the wall. “I called the police,” he blurts out. “They’ll be here any minute.”

Ryan’s face settles into a scowl. “Liar,” he says, but the faint sound of sirens blares to life in the distance. “Fuck.” He throws the remnants of the wine bottle onto the ground. For a moment, their eyes meet. Even blown out and red-rimmed, Spencer remembers those eyes, the eyes of the boy he used to love. Then Ryan flees out the front door. A moment later the screech of tire reaches his ears, as the sirens grow louder.

“Shit,” Spencer swears, ripping the hand towel off the stove. He slides to his knees next to Brendon, grabs the arm held protectively to his boyfriend’s chest, and presses the towel across the deep cut. Brendon hisses, his leg kicking out involuntarily, as he automatically jerks away from the pain. But Spencer tightens his grip around Brendon’s wrist and presses the towel down harder. “Shit, Brendon. Did he?”

Brendon shakes his head no, hissing as Spencer presses the blood-soaked towel harder to slow the bleeding. “He didn’t get the chance to.”

“Thank God,” Spencer says, pressing his forehead into Brendon’s, feeling both their chests heave, assuring himself they’re both relatively okay.

By the time police barge into the room a moment later, the towel is already soaked through, and the man responsible is long gone.

*

It’s two days before Christmas, and instead of throwing his shit together into a duffle bag, maybe luggage if he’s feeling particularly energetic, he’s sitting in a hospital room watching a doctor stitch up his arm. It’s fascinating, he thinks, watching the needle go in and out of his skin pulling the torn flesh together. It shouldn’t look as cool as it does.

No one, but Brendon, knows how much time he’s really spent in the hospital over the last four years. Spencer thinks that night, the night Brendon called him in a panic, was the first, but he’s not even close, and no one but Brendon and Ryan’ll ever know.

The first time was a concussion. He was not quite 20 yet, on a rare break from touring in those days, still living in a semi-crappy apartment because he didn’t have time to find anything better, when he woke up on the floor with no memory of how he got there. He’d been there long enough for the floor to suck the warmth out his body, and his limbs wouldn’t quite work when he told them to move. The back of his head stuck to the floor when he tried to look around, get his bearings, figure out what the Hell happened. It took him a few minutes to notice Ryan standing over him, staring down at him in panic. At the time, Brendon confused the emotion for concern.

_He cares_ , he told himself, and let Ryan take him to the hospital. The fact that he was able to hide the stitches in the back of his head from everyone on tour the next week, even though they shaved part of his head, told Brendon exactly where his place amongst his band was.

The second time was an infection. He was 20, and had to sneak out his hotel room in the middle of the night in a city in Kansas he thinks. He’d told the cab driver to take him to the nearest open clinic. Ryan had tied him up and held a lighter to his skin. Most of the burns had chafed for a few days and then ceased to be a nuisance, but one had festered and burned and turned a horrible shade of red around the edges, pus starting to ooze from the blister. When he couldn’t escape the fever that plagued him, he knew he needed medical help.

Zack caught him sneaking back in, and yelled at him for what seemed like hours on the importance of not going anywhere on tour without telling him first, and if he was sneaking out to get drugs, then Zack would kill him . He’d said he’d just needed to get away.

Brendon never told anyone where he really went.

Broken ribs sent him to the hospital the third time. The doctor very carefully asked him if someone was hurting him, and he very carelessly said no.  The doctor told him no singing, and no strenuous activity, like dancing around on stage, for at least two weeks. They were in a middle of a tour. He couldn’t exactly back out without explaining why, so he pushed on, forced himself through each concert.

He returned to a doctor in some Podunk little town in northeast America two weeks later, the only instructions from the ER he actually followed. The doctor there said he was lucky he didn’t puncture a lung.

But nothing compares to that night, of the embarrassment of having someone poke, and prod, and swab and stitch up one of the most intimate places on his body, while he tried and failed to keep the budding panic from overwhelming him. Nothing compares to the looks of pity from every face he came across, to the female cop that took his hand and urged him to press charges, said she could protect him.

She may have been able to protect him from Ryan, but she couldn’t protect him from the public. She couldn’t protect him from …

So Brendon’s no stranger to hospitals. He’s spent more than his fair share in them.

Apparently, that's the way it's always going to be.

*

It’s two days before Christmas, and he should be sleeping. His bag is neatly packed and ready to go, his plane ticket tucked into the handle. His plane is going to leave for Las Vegas in just a few short hours without him, because instead he’s watching a doctor place stitch after stitch into Brendon’s arm.  Brendon can’t look away, but Spencer can’t look at it. It’s nauseating, and he swears he can see the muscle under the torn skin.

He excuses himself from the room when he can’t handle it anymore, and heads towards the vending machine in search of more coffee. He contemplates calling Zack, or maybe Pete, but immediately dismisses the idea. They already agreed to call no one, but their family to tell them they'd be late arriving. There’s no point in ruining anyone else’s Christmas.

When he comes back from fetching what might be his third cup of coffee after too many hours spent in the hospital, two police officers are walking out of Brendon’s room. He’s been gone – he checks the time on his phone – less than five minutes. The police took less than five minutes taking Brendon’s statement, and they didn’t ask talk to Spencer? No fucking way.  

It can only mean one thing.  

The scalding coffee splashes all over his hand as he crushes the Styrofoam cup in his hand, but he barely feels it as it as he barges into Brendon’s sectioned off part of the emergency room. “You’re not pressing charges?” Spencer says, unable to keep his incredulity out of his voice.

“Spencer, I –”

“No, don’t give me your crap! I didn’t say anything when you didn’t press charges after he _raped_ you, but this is too much. He fucking broke into your house. He shattered your fucking door. He turned your arm in a cutting board. He tried to _rape_ you again. And he was so fucking high he probably won’t even remember it! What is wrong with you? When are you going to say enough is enough? Huh? When are you going to stop letting him do this to you?”

His outburst is met with only silence. He’s so mad right now that he can’t even _look_ at Brendon. A small part of him wonders _why_ he is so mad, but it’s drowned out by the uncontrollable anger. Instead, he storms from the room and smashes his fist into the wall.

Later, when Spencer’s sitting in his own cornered off section of the emergency room waiting for a doctor to come back with the results from his X-ray, he has the good grace to feel embarrassed.

It’s just his luck that the doctor that comes in holding up his X-ray is the same one that treated Brendon the night Spencer brought him to the hospital the first time. She raises an eyebrow at him, and he can’t meet her eyes. He fiddles with a hole in his jeans with his uninjured hand instead.

“Mr. Smith –”

“I know, okay, I know. I know I’d say I’d try to get Brendon to press charges, and I did try, I really did. I just don’t understand why, okay? Why won’t he just press charges? Why does he keep letting Ryan get away with this?” he quickly interrupts.

Both of the doctor’s eyebrows disappear under her bangs. “Are you actually looking for an honest answer?” she asks, tacking his X-ray onto the illuminated board.

“Yes,” Spencer confidently says, though he isn’t so sure he really wants to know. He’s not so sure this is something he should be asking a complete stranger, but it’s the only option he’s got right now, and he’s already blurted out the question with absolutely no control over his mouth, and it’s too late to take it back.

The doctor sighs heavily, and leans her weight against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. “My first abuse case was almost 20 years ago," she admits. Spencer resists the urge to cross his arms across his chest. "It was a young woman, couldn’t have been 19, and I was just a brand new resident who wanted to help, who had never been confronted with abuse before. I urged her to leave him, gave her all the right pamphlets, told here where she could find help, and she told me she didn’t need it.  I treated her a couple of times over the next several years, as well as some of my colleagues, and I found out, unlike most victims of abuse, she _had_  a support system in place. She had a mother who loved her and was willing to take her in. I kept insisting she leave her abuser, that I could get her help, but she refused every time. One day I saw her on the news. Her husband had killed her.”

Spencer looks away from her, squeezing his injured, swollen hand into a fist.

“Since then, over and over again, I’ve seen victims of domestic abuse come through my hospital doors, and while a lot of my colleagues have stopped, _I_ never stopped trying to get them help. But I’m not as successful as I’d like to be. Most of the time they walk right back out the front door with their abuser. As an independent woman, I've struggled to understand why any woman, or man, would subject themselves to abuse, why wouldn’t they just leave? Why would they let someone have that kind of control over them?” she says, pushing off from the wall to take the seat next to him.

“I’ve come to realize over the years that there isn’t one answer to those questions. Some are too afraid to leave because their abuser is a very powerful person,  like a cop or a senator, and even if someone did believe them, they don’t think anyone can help them. Others don’t leave because they have nowhere else to go, and they think subjecting themselves to abuse is better for them and their children than being homeless. Others, I think, identify with their abuser too much because they know their abuser was also abused as child and they think that makes it okay for their abuser to hurt them. But in my opinion, I think most victims don’t leave because they’re scared of more than just their abuser.”

“What else is there to be scared off?”

“Spencer, you must understand that most people realize there’s a physical and, in Brendon’s case, a sexual component to the abuse, but many fail to realize there’s also an emotional component. The abuser makes their partner, or their child, or whomever, feel like the abuse is entirely their fault, that there’s something wrong with them, and that is why they hurt them.  If the victim hadn’t already believed that about themselves to begin with, which most do already from previous abusive relationships, then years of abuse wears them down until they are _certain_ the abuse is their fault. They believe if they could just do better, or be a better person, the abuse would end. It’s why so many people never come forward.”

Spencer curls his injured hand into his chest, and looks away, ashamed. That’s _exactly_ what Ryan did to Brendon, and he knew that, should have known that.

“They fail to realize it doesn’t work that way, that it isn’t their fault. They could be the perfect human being and still get beaten or forced into sexual activities by their partner, or parent, or whomever. _If_  they manage to leave their abuser, those thoughts don’t just magically disappear. They don’t stop hating themselves, and they don’t stop thinking there is something wrong with them. And suddenly, they find themselves surrounded with family, or old or new friends, or other people with good intentions, but they start to think, ‘one day these people are going to see exactly what my abuser did. They’re going to see all my flaws, and everything that’s wrong with me. When that happens, it’ll only be a matter of time before they start punishing me the same way my partner did, and I’ll deserve it.’”

“You’re saying Brendon’s afraid of me?” Spencer says, finally looking up to meet the doctor’s eyes.

She gives him a sad smile, and a shrug of her shoulders. “I think you need to go out to the waiting room and address those issues yourself.”

Spencer’s shoulders sag. “Yeah.”

“You’re hands not broken. Just ice it for a few days and you’ll be fine,” she says, popping to her feet. “Now let’s get your discharge papers so you can begin apologizing to your young man.

*

When Spencer reaches the waiting room, Brendon is there waiting for him, and if that doesn’t make Spencer feel like the biggest dick on the planet he doesn’t know what else would. Brendon’s staring into the vending machine, unmoving, his back to Spencer when he approaches.

“Brendon.”

Brendon whips around to meet him, and nearly stumbles, the pain meds making him dizzy and uncoordinated. He sees Brendon’s knees buckle, and then forcibly straighten out again, but not because of the meds or because he’s tired, because he’s fighting his instincts to drop to his knees to please his abusive partner. Spencer reaches for him, to steady him, or maybe pull him into a hug, he doesn’t really know. But Brendon pulls his injured arm towards his chest and draws away, almost shrinking in height as he flinches away from Spencer. “Sorry,” Brendon says, dropping his gaze to the floor, keeping  a protective hold on his arm.

“No, no,” he says, making an aborted movement towards Brendon, only to have him flinch away again. He’s terrifying Brendon right now, he thinks, so he finds the closest chair and falls back into it. “You have nothing to be sorry about, okay? I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I can’t even begin to understand what you’re going through right now, and it’s your life, okay. If this is what you want, then I support your decision.”

Brendon doesn’t lift his head, but his eyes wander up to meet Spencer’s before dropping to stare at the floor again. Spencer figures that’s the best he’s going to get in response. Until today, until this moment, it had never even crossed his mind that Brendon could think Spencer might hurt him. He hopes he still has time to remedy that. 

“Let’s go home.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait on this guys. It's angsty and I was going for the emotional gut punch with this, but I'm not quite sure I got there. But, as the ending implies, there is a lot of fluff ahead from here on till the end. And no offense to Spencer's mom or anything. I'm sure she is a very lovely person in real life, but in this chapter she's a bit ... oblivious.

He wakes up after a 2 hour nap on Christmas Eve groggy, and miserable, and regretting every second of that nap. It was a necessarily evil - he decides, as he downs half a pot of coffee, hastily showers, and throws on whatever clothes he can find – one that will give him just enough energy to make the long drive back to Vegas since he missed his flight.

Christmas will be a welcome distraction, he hopes, filled with presents, and hugs, and enough food and dessert to feed a small army. It’s a chance to put Ryan, and the massive amount of pressure to get a CD done, and the depressing monotony that his and Brendon’s life has taken on, all behind him even if just for one day.

“If we leave now, we’ll make it just in time for you to be there to make cookies for Santa with your nieces and nephews,” Spencer says, rushing into the living room trying to drag his suitcase behind him and snap his watch on at the same time and failing miserably.

A strangled noise comes from Brendon that does not sound like an assent. He eyes trail to the couch where Brendon is lying on his side, cocooned in blankets, staring blankly at the TV.

“Did you go to bed at all last night?” Spencer asks, though he already knows the answer. He sits gingerly on the edge of the couch by Brendon’s feet, and wraps a hand around the ankle peaking free from the cocoon of blankets. “Come on, up. You can sleep in the car.”

Brendon draws in a ragged breath, but evenly says, “I’m not going home, Spence.”

Spencer swallows thickly. Out of all the things Brendon could have done after what happened, this was the worst case scenario that had crossed his mind. He knew Brendon –and himself to an extent – was becoming more and more reluctant to leave his house. But to not even want to go home for Christmas? That’s …. That’s … “That’s crazy,” Spencer says, keeping his voice deceptively calm. “You love spending Christmas with your family.”

The blankets shift as Brendon shrugs, eyes glued to the tv and whatever shitty program is on.

“You can’t stay here all alone,” Spencer says, his hand tightening around Brendon’s ankle.

“I’ll be fine,” Brendon says, voice muffled by the blanket.

“No, you’re really, really not.”

“I’m not going to hurt myself,” Brendon says, trying to play it off like a joke, but it’s hollow, empty, and not a guarantee. The bags under Brendon’s eyes are so dark they look like bruises, and he knows under that blanket Brendon’s hiding a body that is far skinnier than it should be. Whether intentional or not, Brendon is already hurting himself. “I can’t leave you here alone.”

“You shouldn’t ruin your Christmas just because I’m not in the mood to face my family right now. Just go, please. I promise I’ll be fine,” Brendon says, sounding almost as desperate as Spencer.

“No, I’m not leaving you here by yourself,” Spencer says shaky and panicked and pleading.  “What if,” he says licking his dry lips, “what if you came home with me?”

“Spence – ”

“Please, Brendon,” he begs. Christmas is one of Brendon’s favorite things. He talks about nothing but the time he gets to spend with his nieces and nephews for weeks. It’s the only time his whole family will be in one spot, and the only time he gets to see some of them, and the only time no one in the family hassles Brendon about his proclivities.  He knows it's irrational to think, but his gut is screaming at him that if he leaves Brendon here all alone, that's it, there's no coming back from this. Brendon'll never recover, he'll never move on, he'll never get past this. They'll never get past this. He'll stay locked up in his house like a hermit for the rest of his life, abandoning his friends, family, and eventually even his music until there's nothing left to save. He’s losing Brendon, he thinks, but not just him, everyone is. Brendon is losing himself, and Spencer is sliding down right along with him. He's not really sure who he is anymore or how he fits in this new world they're trying to build, and that terrifies Spencer. “Please.”

Brendon’s eyes are as wet as his when he shifts them away from the TV finally to meet Spencer’s. Brendon knows what Spencer is thinking, has come to the same conclusion, and has just … given up. But there has to be some spark left in him, something that’s not ready to stop fighting. “Please,” Spencer says again, “come with me.”

He doesn’t hold back the sigh of relief when Brendon agrees.

*

He pulls up to his childhood home dead tired, but glad to be home. There’s something that feels like nostalgia in his chest, warm and bright, filled with memories  of hope, and excitement, and anticipation. It burns and tries to break free, but something keeps it smothered in his chest, a low thrum of anxiety still flowing through his veins.

Brendon chews on his thumb nail in the passenger seat, left leg bouncing up and down at odds with the song whispering through the speakers. It’s the Beatles, he thinks, but that’s not exactly encouraging.

He shoots Brendon an encouraging smile, and the corner of Brendon’s lips twitch up in a mockery of his own smile.

Neither makes a move to exit the car, until he sees his mother rushing down the driveway, a light blue shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

“Who’s that with you?” his mother greets them. Spencer’s hunched over the back seat, pulling out their luggage, Brendon still glued to the passenger seat. He contemplates the gentlest way to pry him out the car if need be. “Is that Ryan, dear?”

Spencer tenses, his hands clenching around the handles of their cases, before he pastes on his best imitation of a smile, and turns to face his mother. “No, mom. It’s Brendon, my boyfriend. I called on the way, remember?”

“Oh,” she says, and he’s not imaging the disappointment in her tone. Somehow it’s his mother’s disappointment that propels Brendon from the car.

“Hi, Mrs. Smith,” Brendon says, kicking at the dirt with his beat up purple vans like a little kid in trouble standing before his parents.

“Well, come in,” his mother says, linking her arm with his and tugging him into the house, Brendon trailing behind them. “Now what is it that took you so long to get here?”

“An accident,” Spencer said, watching Brendon tug the sleeves of his long-sleeve shirt down to hide the bandage his mother didn’t even ask about.

*

Spencer once walked in on his parents having sex when he was 12. Christmas Eve dinner at the Smith house that year was a thousand times more awkward than that. His sisters, bless their sweet hearts, tried really, really hard to keep the conversation light and in the spirit of the holiday, but his mother kept sneaking glances at Brendon that were just a touch above resentful, and Brendon, for his part, wouldn’t stop staring at his plate and picking at the food rather than eating it.

His mother commented on Brendon’s lack of appetite, even went so far as to say she "made Ryan’s favorite dish, and he would have gobbled it right down.” Brendon mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like an apology, while everyone else found the tablecloth suddenly and very interesting. Spencer pressed his lips together, and repeated in his head every reason why he had not told his mother about Ryan yet.

Needless to say, there was a collective sigh of relief from everyone when dinner was done, and rather than sit around and talk or play card games like they usually would, everyone sprung from their seats to put their dishes away.

His sisters dragged his boyfriend into the living room to watch a Charlie Brown’s Christmas, while his mom all but demanded he help her make hot chocolate.

Really, Spencer should have known it was a trap.

“How’s Ryan doing?” his mother asks, not for the first time since he arrived home less than three hours ago as soon as they were alone in the kitchen. He wished she’d show this must concern for his boyfriend who has 40 stitches in his arm curtesy of the asshole his mother is so worried about.

 “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Spencer says, feeling the pressure from an oncoming headache build between his eyes.

“How come you and Ryan never dated?” she not so innocently asked. His mother had been trying to set him and Ryan up since he was 14 and told her he liked boys and girls. It wasn’t entirely her fault. She didn’t know … But he’d been asking her to let it go for five years, and Brendon was his boyfriend now. It was time to let the subject die a permanent and horrible death.

“What happened between the two of you?” she asks, refusing to let the subject go like Spencer has been begging her to. “ _He’s not who you think he is, mom, just let it go,”_ he had said on multiple occasions, trying not to ruin the image of Ryan she had in her head. “You used to be so close.”

“Yeah, well, shit happens,” he says, rubbing between his eyes distractedly. 

“Is this about the music? You shouldn’t ruin a lifetime of friendship just because of some silly little disagreement over some songs,” she continues to push, and push, and push him. She places a hand on his forearm, and he holds himself still despite how much he wants to jerk away.

 He looks around the kitchen finding any excuse to escape. “It’s not about the music,” he hisses in response, eyes glancing towards Brendon, who’s still on the couch, snuggled close to his sisters. “You’ll regret it if you know the truth, so I’m asking you for the last time, drop it, please,” he says through clenched teeth. 

“If you don’t call him and invite him over for Christmas dinner, I will,” she says, with a tone of finality that he loathes, has always loathed, as she reaches for the landline.

“You will do no such thing,” he says, taking a tone with his mother he would never dared have before. The pressure behind his eyes is cresting over the damn, threatening to break and encompass his entire skull. The only thing written on his mind now is the fettered thoughts of his childhood, of whether or not there _was_ a son his mother loved more than him. “I will never talk to Ryan again, and I’d rather be caught with my pants around my ankles in front of a bunch of school girls than ever be in the same room as him again.”

“Spencer James Smith,” she says, her voice rising to match his. “Is that anyway to talk about your best friend?”

“Brendon is my best friend,” he interrupts, but she barrels on like he hadn’t spoken a word.

“With Ryan’s father gone, we are the only family that boy has. You need to settle whatever silly little differences –”

“He raped me,” he says, feeling the words flow from him without a filter.  “Ryan forced himself on me when we were teenagers, okay. You happy now?” He wished he could stop it right there, but his mouth keeps moving without his consent, spilling the words he has never said before. “And I tried, I _tried_ , to cut him out of my life completely after that, but guess _what_? One day I come home and he’s just sitting at the kitchen table like he owned the place, like he belonged there because _you_ invited him in.”

His mother opens her mouth. To protest? To apologize? To call him a liar? It doesn’t matter. He’s just so mad. At her. At Ryan. At the world. At everything. He can’t stop, maybe doesn’t want to, now.

“I was going to quit the band anyways, no matter what you or Ryan wanted, but I stayed to be closer to Brendon,” he says, sneaking another glance into the living room, but Brendon’s nowhere to be seen. “Because, he’s kind of it for me, you know?

“But It was a mistake,” he says, covering his eyes with his hand. “It’s my fault. I should have tried harder to keep Brendon away from Ryan. Cuz you know what else Ryan did, _mom?_ Ryan spent two years beating the shit out of Brendon, and forcing him to have sex with him, before he hurt Brendon so badly he ended up in the hospital. You really think Brendon spent four days in the hospital cuz he tripped over his goddamn dog? That was just some bullshit PR release to hide the fact that Ryan snapped his arm like a goddamn twig before raping him. And what do you really think happened to Brendon’s arm? Who do you think broke into our fucking house yesterday and attacked us? How far do you think Ryan would have gotten this time if I hadn’t called the police? He tried to stab Brendon in the chest before he sliced his arm open. He could have killed him, and you just keep acting like Ryan is God’s greatest gift. But guess what mom, you’re favorite _son_ is really a monster.”

“Spence—” she starts, but he cuts her off again. He doesn’t want to hear her come to Ryan’s defense again.

“I _might_ have been able to forgive him for what he did to me as a teenager, but I will never, ever be able to forgive him for what he did to Brendon that night,” he says, slamming his fist down on the table, making his mother jump. “But it was just a ‘silly little argument.’ So go ahead, _mom._   Invite Ryan for dinner, because Brendon and I won’t be here.”

He jumps from his seat so quickly, his chair clatters to the ground. His father is frozen in shock in the kitchen doorway as Spencer rushes past him. The front door slams shut behind him.

*

It’s like vomiting. The spew of vile dialogue held back tightly behind clenched teeth relieves the ache in his stomach. For a moment he can breathe easily again. But just like having food poisoning, he knows the ache will build again. He knows the sickness isn’t gone yet.

“You were right,” Spencer says when he senses Brendon sneak up behind him. “We should have just stayed home.” 

“You’ve been holding this in since it happened,” Brendon says, sitting down next to him on the curb, and pressing his side along Spencer’s. “You needed to get that off your chest.”

“I know … I think. It feels cathartic almost, but God, I still can’t believe I said it like that, and to my mother of all people,” he says, burying his face in his heads. “I meant it, though. I meant everything I said. I mean, I don’t think she loves Ryan more than she does me, but it always felt that way as a kid, you know? And even now, she just couldn’t trust me enough to let it go. She just _had_ to keep pushing.”

Brendon tugs one of Spencer’s hands away from his face and interlaces their fingers. He tugs until Spencer’s curled into him and wraps his arm around Spencer’s back.

“Ryan raped me, didn’t he?” he softly asks, not bothering to cover his tears. Brendon is the one person he doesn’t have to hide from. “I always told myself it was my fault. That it wasn’t rape because I said yes at first, but it was wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Brendon quietly answers, rubbing his hand soothingly across Spencer’s lower back.  “Yeah, he did.”

“How could he just do that to me? I’m just so goddamned angry. Is that wrong?”

“No, you have every right to be angry,” Brendon says.

“Then why aren’t you?” he asks. It was one of the many questions that had been bothering him ever since he found out what Ryan was doing to Brendon at that one fateful meet and greet. Brendon was a lot of things at the moment, none of them very good, but  angry? Never, not once it seemed, at least not in Spencer’s presence. For Spencer, though, this was the closest he had ever come to hating another person. It didn’t feel good. It felt like a maggot-filled raccoon corpse habiting where his sternum should be.

“What’s the point?” Brendon says, shrugging one shoulder. “I just don’t have the energy to be angry, I guess,” he says, like it’s that easy.  Maybe for Brendon, it is.

“Why?” he presses, knowing there’s a lot Brendon isn’t telling him.

“Spencer, I know you don’t want to hear this right now,” he says, pausing to chew on his lower lip, “But from the very first time Ryan and I had sex to the very last time he … I could just tell someone had done the same to him, you know? Sometimes when he was hitting me, or when he was … his eyes would go blank, and he would start repeating these awful words, almost like a recording, like he’d heard them from someone before. I just knew someone had done the same thing to him, and he was just repeating what he knew, amplifying his own pain onto something else. I never found out who, and I was never able to get him help for it. I thought I could, I don’t know, save him or something, but I guess he didn’t want to be.”

“That’s not your fault,” Spencer said, trying to catch Brendon’s eye. “And it doesn’t give him the right to hurt anyone else.” _Especially you,_ Spencer thinks to himself. He knows Brendon wouldn’t appreciate that if he said it out loud.

Brendon shrugs, a quick shaky jerk of his shoulders. Spencer wraps both arms around his waist and pulls him in tighter. “I was the idiot that stayed,” Brendon said. “And I can’t really be mad about that, can I?”

He’s about to vehemently deny it, go on another tirade because what’s one more after the fit he threw in the kitchen, but his mother calls his name, voice thick with tears and far too close for comfort.

Brendon recoils away from him, springs to his feet, and slips past his mother towards the car.

They both know they’re not staying anymore.

*

He apologizes to his family - as his mother sobs in the kitchen asking him when it happened, and why he never told her, and demanding details he doesn’t want to give - before he grabs their luggage and meets Brendon at the car, leaving the wound caused by the night’s events open, and bleeding, and infected. It’ll need to be cauterized, but not tonight. Tonight, it’s too raw, and he’s too tired, doesn’t have the mental capacity to handle it right now. He’ll come back in a few days when everyone’s settled, and Christmas is far, far behind them.

For just this year, and this one last time he hopes, Christmas is cancelled for the Smith-Urie coalition.

“I’m sorry,” Spencer says when Brendon pulls into their driveway after the long drive home. They never even stopped. He’s drained, emotionally and physically, feels sort of like greasy dish soap trying to drain from a clogged restaurant sink. He expected to feel some sort or relief.

Instead he feels nothing at all.

“For what?”

“Ruining Christmas, for starters, “ Spencer says with a self-deprecating laugh.

Brendon sighs, eyes fixed on the keys he’s fiddling with in his lap. “Christmas was already kind of ruined, dude. That’s not your fault.”

“Still, I shouldn’t have dragged you home with me. And my mother. God, I didn’t know. I’m sorry she was kind of … kind of a jerk to you.”

To his surprise, Brendon laughs. “It’s kind of the only reason I agreed to come with you,” Brendon explains with another shrug, and his own wry smile. “Your mother doesn’t …  I already knew I wasn’t exactly her favorite person, you know? Just meant no one would be fussing over my arm, or asking questions I’m not ready to answer yet. It was kind of nice.”

“You just …”

“What?” Brendon says, finally meeting his eyes.

“You’re kind of amazing, you know that?”

“Not really.”

“No, you really, really are,” Spencer insists.

Brendon just shrugs again, and clenches the keys tightly in his fist. “It's me that should be sorry," he says. "Maybe if i was more in the Christmas spirit things would have turned out differently." 

“It’s not your fault,” Spencer says, reaching out to touch Brendon. 

“I just want things to get better, and I don’t know how to do that,” Brendon admits.

“We blame Ryan for everything,” he says with a wry laugh. He didn't mean to say that. It just kind of rushed to the forefront of his mind, and regurgitated out of his mouth, but it's not a half bad idea. 

“Spencer,  we can’t just use Ryan as a scapegoat for our problems,” Brendon says, though the corner of his lips twitch up. He half turns towards Spencer, as much as the steering wheel will allow, and swivels the car keys around his pointer finger.

“No, hear me out,” Spencer says, turning to lean his back against the door. “We’ve both been telling each other quite a lot lately, ‘it’s not your fault,’ but I don’t think either of us really believe that. Not yet at least. But we should. Ryan may be messed up – I sort of knew that growing up when we were kids and I know that hasn’t changed – but that doesn’t make me feel any better knowing he’s not just a psychopathic jerk. But Ryan being messed up, him hurting us? That’s not our fault, Brendon. We’re not the ones that hurt him, and we’re not the ones that made him hurt other people. You did what you could, and just because that didn’t make a difference in the end doesn’t make what happened your fault either. We have to let him go. Whatever happens to him next, that’s in his hands, it always has been. We gotta focus on us, on moving forward with our lives, and letting go of everything else, even the guilt. Especially the guilt.”

Brendon stops swirling the keys around his finger, and pounds his knuckles lightly on the steering wheel. He’s chewing on his lower lip when he glances at Spencer, but there’s something in his eyes that doesn’t look dead and hollow and hopeless.

“It’s not about scapegoating Ryan for all our problems,” Spencer continues. “It’s a metaphor for letting go. We just say Ryan did it and let it go, move on. There’s a pile of dishes in the sink that nobody, and I mean you, haven't washed for days and are starting to smell? You know what? Ryan did it. We missed our wake up call, and we’re 10 minutes late for our interview, and the interviewer is a bitch, and everything goes wrong at sound check, and the crowd is less than enthusiastic? We just say Ryan did it, laugh about it, and move on.”

“Yeah?” Brendon says with the first real smile Spencer’s seen in weeks. “Works for anything, huh?”

“Anything we want it to,” Spencer nods along.

Brendon grabs him by the shirt, and pulls him forward over the center console. “Okay,” he says before pressing his lips chastely to Spencer’s. "I can do that. Well, we can try at least, right?"

"That's all we can do," Spencer says, cupping the back of Brendon's neck and sneaking another kiss. 

“I kind of love you," Brendon whispers against his lips. 

“Kind of?” Spencer teases, though his heart is beating fast and thundering against his rib cage. “That’s good,” he says, kissing Brendon again. “Because I definitely love you.”

*

Spencer wakes up the next morning to the soft sound of music filtering through their bedroom door.  It sounds like Jingle Bell Rock, and he expects to feel like he’s been punched in the gut at the reminder that today is Christmas. Instead, he feels warm and content for the first time in a long time. He instinctually reaches for Brendon, but the other side of the bed is empty, the sheets cold and long abandoned.

He chases the sound of music to the kitchen where he finds Brendon staring out the shattered sliding glass door, cradling a cup of coffee. He’s torn down the plastic sheet Spencer haphazardly duct taped around the gaping hole before they left for Vegas on Christmas Eve. The sun filters through the opening, glinting off the shards of glass still littered across the kitchen and backyard.  

He pads up next to Brendon and wraps an arm around his waist.

Brendon leans into him, and tilts his head onto Spencer’s shoulder. "You should really call your parents. Your mother's called your phone about a hundred times. She even called me."

"I will," Spencer says. "Just not yet. I need time, still, to cool down and figure out what I want to say." 

Brendon hums in agreement. "Just don't take too long or you'll never do it." 

"I won't," he promises, and presses a kiss to the top of Brendon's head. He steals the cup of coffee from Brendon, and takes a large gulp of what he realizes too late is cold coffee. 

Together, they watch as their neighbor’s cat leaps from the hedges, startling a flock of finches that flutter from the bushes, swirl around the backyard and disappear into the sky. Jingle Bell Rock ends and switches over to Blue Christmas by Elvis. Just above the music, he can hear one of their neighbor's children squealing in delight, the sound sneaking in unfiltered through the hole in the house. 

Brendon closes his eyes and leans heavily on Spencer. “I don’t want to live here anymore,” he says.

“You want to maybe buy a house together?” Spencer asks, looking anywhere but down at Brendon. 

He feels Brendon shift in his arms, and a peck of soft lips on his cheek. 

“Yeah, I kind of do," Brendon says.

"That's good," Spencer says, "because I definitely want to. 


	6. Intermission

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I promised fluff ... and I mostly failed to deliver. But in my defense, I see this chapter more as an intermission between chapters, if that makes sense to anyone besides myself, as only part of this chapter was planned from the beginning and the rest I thought up in the last two weeks. But seriously, after this chapter most of the angst is over, and much of the rest of the story is little snippets of them moving on and being happy together that tie a lot into some of the things I wrote about in the fic that spawned this one.

“The label _strongly suggested_ we give credit to Ryan for that one part in Nearly Witches,” Spencer says through the phone, and he sounds almost apologetic. His boyfriend had left a few hours earlier to meet with the label, and go through and sign some paperwork. Brendon had … opted to stay home instead. He wasn’t good with all that label stuff anyways, and even before the split Spencer had always taken care of those kinds of things. It was better just to leave it to him.

Spencer, however, called for his opinion on the matter of giving Ryan credit before signing off on it, and he appreciates it, he really does. But a tiny, selfish part of him wishes Spencer had just signed the damn paperwork and never told him.

Brendon doesn’t know what to say. They’d done their best to cut Ryan out of their lives, but he kept showing up, kept inserting his chaos into their poorly cobbled together order, kept ruining their lives at random intervals. It made his skin itchy, wondering when Ryan was going to pop up next, find another way to harass them or insert his will into their lives.

“Babe?” Spencer asks. The words catch in Brendon’s throat, some sort of strangled imitation of a sound emits from the back of his throat instead. “Hey, it’s okay. We can cut the song,” Spencer says in that soothing placating voice that gets under his skin like ringworm.

“It’s too late to cut the song,” Brendon manages to say. The CD comes out in just three months. Cutting it means extra costs and delaying the release date, neither of which he particularly wants to do. Plus, they’d nitpicked and fussed over and changed so many things on the CD in the last six months he’s pretty sure someone at the label might blow a fuse and strangle them if they decide to change one more thing.

Spencer’s quiet for a moment. “I think we should do it,” he admits. “This way he can’t sue us if he ever finds out, and we can keep him as far away from us as possible for the foreseeable future. Okay?”

The clock on the oven ticks over to 1:30. It doesn’t make a sound, but in his mind he can hear ticking and a solid _thwack,_ like something heavy hitting the ground. He flinches, and tears his eyes from the clock. A breeze through the hole where his back door should be stirs the hairs on the back of his neck, making him shiver. It’s supposed to get fixed today … he thinks. He grips the handle on his fridge until his knuckles turn white, resting his fevered forehead against the metallic surface.

“B,” Spencer says, his voice so soft it’s almost a whisper. “It’s just one tiny part of one song. Everything else, that was you. That was all you.”

“You don’t understand,” he says, voice strangled, words heavy on his tongue. “They’re all going to say I can’t do it without Ryan. They’re all going to … “

“No one is going to think that, B,” Spencer says in that soothing, placating baby voice again. It’s irritating. And Spencer is a big fat liar.  

“Ryan will. Jon will.”

“Their opinions don’t matter,” Spencer says darkly. “ _You_ put the hard work in, you wrote the songs, and everyone’s going to know it. Okay?”

 “Yeah, okay,” Brendon agrees. He knows this is for the best, but it still hurts that Ryan damages everything he loves, and that Brendon still cares. 

“I’ll be home soon. I’m leaving right now. When I get there we have to hurry to meet the realtor. Then we’ll talk about it more after. Okay?”

“Sure,” Brendon mumbles, and thumbs the phone off, before squeezing his eyes shut, and banging his forehead off the fridge.  

Minutes pass like that. He can feel himself shaking, and he’s jittery and exhausted all at once, skin feeling taught and stretched thinly over his bone and muscles. “What the fuck is wrong with me?” he says, and bangs his head against the fridge again.

He pulls himself together, grabs the milk from the fridge and a bowl from the cupboards. _Everything is fucking fine,_ he insists over and over again.

Then the neighbor’s cat shrieks. He startles, both the milk and the bowl stumbling from his hands. The cap pops off the carton, milk spilling over his toes and across the tiles. The bowl cracks and shatters, splinters of ceramic scattering across the recently cleaned floors.

_Shit,_ he frantically thinks. _Shit, shit, shit._ Maybe he can clean it up before he notices?

He yanks a hand towel off the stove, sops up the milk, then sweeps up the ceramic pieces and hides them and the empty milk carton on the bottom of the trash. When he tears open the cupboard to grab another bowl his hands grip the handle.

The missing bowl is glaringly obvious. The bowls are always stacked neatly next to the dinner plates, and when all the bowls are present and accounted for they should stack higher than the plates.

They don’t.

He’ll notice, sooner or later he’ll notice, and he’ll …

Maybe he can reorder everything in the shelves, and say he just went on a cleaning spree? That might work, and it might cause just enough chaos and confusion he’ll never notice.

He’s reaching for the plates when he hears a car door slam shut.

It’s too late.

He’s here.

“I’m home!” someone yells from the front door.

He freezes, hand still stretched out towards the cupboard when he sees a silhouette enter the room from the corner of his eye. His breath catches in his throat.

“Hey, B. You okay?” Spencer carefully says.

Brendon physically shakes himself. Something’s not right, somethings …  “What?” he says, forcing his hand to drop to his side. It twitches , and he flexes his hand, clenching and unclenching his fist trying to make the shaking go away. “What?”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he snaps, crossing his arms to smother the shaking. 

Spencer eyes him warily. “Okay,” he says in that careful tone. “You still want to go?”

“Go where?” he mumbles. There’s something in his brain, panicked and scared and freaking the fuck out, that says back away from Spencer. There’s something underneath, soft and unsure, whispering over and over _Spencer’s safe._ Both thoughts clash, like gladiators in the arena, making his knees weak and his heart beat thready and uneven.

He takes a step back until his ass hits the counter.

“To meet the realtor,” Spencer says with a frown. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Fine,” he mumbles, and rushes past Spencer towards the car. He doesn’t really want to leave the house right now, but it doesn’t really feel like he has a choice.

*

“This house is perfect for young musicians such as yourself,” he hears the realtor say through what feels like layers of mud and silt and dirty pond water. She’s pretty, he thinks in an abstract manner, all soft corners, short, and blonde, and most importantly, non-threatening.

His skin itches still, something crawling and slithering around just beneath the dermis. He’s twitchy, nervous, and there’s a steady thrum of … something just underneath that, buried somewhere in his brain. He can’t identify it, but it scratches at the back of his mind like a needy child begging for attention. He’s so focused on that, on the _itch_ that the real world fades into the background. His chest is too tight, it’s too hard to breath.

Spencer’s hand wrapped loosely around his wrist is the only part of him not trembling.

“The couple who owns this house recently renovated the kitchen,” the realtor’s sweet voice sounds from far away. The hand around his wrist and another on the small of his back lead him into the kitchen.

“What do you think, Bren?” Spencer asks, once he’s pulled inside the room.

He thinks it’s too small, too closed in, too tight. He glances around the room, because he was given a direct order to (that was an order, right?).

The cupboards are white. He hates white cupboards, you can never quite get the stains out of them. The floors and the backsplash are both some garish shade of yellow. It's atrocious. Then his eyes fall on the counters. There's hot sauce on the counter mixed in with a few other groceries the owner must have forgotten to put away. There’s a little skull hanging from the unopened lid, the words Ultra Death Sauce printed just above another skull.

He knows that hot sauce.

Spencer’s hand tightens its hold around his wrist. “Can you give us a moment?” he hears Spencer say, distant and far away. “Seriously, what’s going on?” Spencer asks him, he thinks.

He jerks his wrist free, and stumbles backward until his back collides with something solid.

In his mind, he can see Ryan waltz into the kitchen. Ryan approaches with fire in his eyes, the kind that usually burns his skin, leaves it raw and bleeding and stripped of dignity. His hands scrabble for purchase, as Ryan boxes him against the counter.

With alcohol on his breath and something that smells sickly sweet, Ryan crowds him against the counter. He expects a lot of this in that moment. For Ryan to hit him, or maybe clamp his long bony fingers around Brendon’s shoulders and push him to his knees. Maybe Ryan’ll spin him around, and shove his face into the counter. ~~~~

Instead, Ryan tries to kiss him.

There’s a lot of things Brendon is not allowed to deny Ryan anymore, including more than just his ass and mouth. But he does not have to give him this.

He does not have to give him his love.

The kiss falls just short of his check.

Ryan’s mocking laughter in response makes him flinch.

A hand clamps down on his jaw, forces his head straight. “You don’t want to kiss me?” Ryan says in the same mocking tone as his laugh.

He can’t say no. Bad things happen when Brendon says no, so he stays silent instead.

Ryan forces the kiss on him anyway, and then spins him around, slams his face into the counter. He doesn’t say a word as he yanks Brendon’s pants to his knees. Ryan blindly reaches out, grabs the bottle of Ultra Death Sauce left carelessly on the counter.  A hand on his back holds him down as he hears the bottle pop open. The first squirt of liquid lands on his lower back where Ryan had left a particularly nasty welt the night before. The hot sauce digs in into the cut, spreading barbs of hot fire along his skin. He clenches his eyes shut, and bites his lip to hold back a gasp of pain as Ryan digs his finger into the welt, spreading the hot sauce across the cut. He fights not to shout ‘No’ as Ryan spreads it lower, the cold bottle pressing against his skin, and …

“Brendon!”

He jerks out of the memory. His heart is beating so fast it feels like it’s not beating at all. His chest hurts, and he chokes on his next breath.

He feels both of Spencer’s hands on his shoulders, before his vision clears and focuses on Spencer’s concerned face.

“You with me?” Spencer softly asks. Brendon numbly nods.

“Can you walk to the car?”

Unable to force his numb tongue to work, Brendon nods again, but accepts the steadying hand wrapped around his bicep without complaint. Once in the car, he pushes his sweaty forehead against the cool glass. Through the crack in the window, he can hear Spencer apologizing to the realtor, and her murmured response.

“I’m completely understand,” she says. “My brother had PTSD, too, from the war.”

He blocks out whatever she says next.

-

 

“I need to shower,” he says once they’re home. Before Spencer can say anything, he’s tearing out of the car and rushing towards the bedroom. He slams the door shut behind him.

He turns the water in the shower on hot enough to burn his skin, and steps in, just like he showered that day after Ryan was done. He tries to wash away the feeling of hands, and shame, and other unmentionables, but some sin just can’t be cleansed.

He couldn’t (can’t?) do this anymore. He just can’t. It doesn’t matter what happens to the band, to _him._ It doesn’t matter if he never gets to make music again. It doesn’t matter if he has to live a penniless existence from now until the rest of his life.  He’d rather live on the streets than spend one more second being forced to submit to whatever depraved act Ryan can think of next just to humiliate him and break him down into tiny irreparable pieces. It doesn’t matter what happens to Ryan either, he thinks.

But when he tries to sneak out, Jon catches him. He recognizes that look on Jon’s face, the sneer of disgust.

He never looks at Ryan that way.

“Why do you keep him around all the time?” Jon murmurs, but Brendon still hears it, before the two disappear into Ryan’s music room.

He thinks he was supposed to hear it.

Ryan laughs in response.

He knows then if he leaves, everyone will know why. Everyone will look at him the same way John does. Everyone will …

He shakes his head. It’s worth it. He can handle that … maybe. It’s better than the things Ryan does to him every day. He’ll just live as a hermit until the fervor dies down.

He can do that right?

His hides in Ryan’s room until John leaves, and then gathers what few items he has at Ryan’s place. He’s at the door, ready to leave all of this behind forever: the band, Pete and Patrick, and even … Spencer.

But then …

Then Ryan reaches a bony hand out to him from his sprawl on the couch. His eyes are blown out, nearly black with all the drugs coursing through his veins. “Brendon,” he says in a scared, vulnerable voice, the one Brendon hardly ever hears these days. He thinks it’s the voice of the child Ryan was before whatever it is that happened to change him. It shouldn’t mean anything to him. It shouldn’t make his heart ache and reach out towards this broken boy. It shouldn’t stop him from leaving.

It does.

“What?” he asks on a shaky exhale.

“Stay,” Ryan says.

That one word shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.

He ignores his better judgement, ignores the voice in his head that says if he stays Ryan will tear him apart piece by piece, will eventually kill him. Ryan needs him. Needs someone to keep from falling apart completely. Whatever happened to Ryan, whatever made him this way, it wasn’t his fault.

Brendon can relate to that. 

So, he stays.

But he can’t ignore the small part of him that whispers in his ear like a devil on his shoulder that the real reason he stays is the music, and the fear he’ll never get to make music again if he leaves.

The hots water shuts off abruptly. He jumps as a towel is draped over his shoulders and two strong arms wrap around him, pulling him from the shower.

He can feel the pressure behind his eyes, but he doesn’t cry. He can’t. He won’t.

But he lets Spencer hold him in his arms until the shaking nearly goes away.

*

Pete likes to give people the benefit of the doubt, so when he hears nothing from Brendon and Spencer for months he chalks it up to the two of them being busy making an album. When he calls them five times in two weeks and neither answer, he thinks _they’re just busy_ recording _the album._ When neither one calls him back, he still just wants to believe they were so busy that it just slipped their mind to _call back their fucking boss_ and close personal best friend _._ Butch Walker, who _did_ call him back, said the album was finished, which made Pete frown because that is something he feels like Brendon or Spencer should have called and told him. Butch, however, declined to offer any speculations on their mental or emotional state at the time of recording.

When he calls Brendon the day after Christmas and the call goes straight to voicemail on the second ring, Pete can deny it no longer.

The little fucker is _definitely_ ignoring him.

“What the fuck am I going to do?” he says to his dog, and swivels around in the chair in his home studio until he’s dizzy. His dog briefly stares up at him from his dog bed in the corner of the room, before going back to sleep.

“Some help you are,” he mutters, spinning around in the chair again.

He’s been there, been down that road that Brendon and Spencer are aimlessly ambling upon. Been to the point where he avoided everyone and everything, convinced himself his friends and family didn’t really want to hear from him until he was popping enough pills to stop his heart. He knows he can’t just leave the issue alone anymore. Letting the two of them work it out on their own clearly isn’t working.

When Pete was lower than the bottom of a well, he had Patrick. And without Patrick _then_ , Pete would not be here _now_.

He’s starting to wonder if he needs to be Brendon and Spencer’s Patrick, a lantern to help them off the dark path they were treading down and back onto the road to recovery. Or maybe they need Patrick to be their, well, Patrick because Pete has never been the nurturing kind. He doesn’t have a clue on where to begin, and he’s contemplating calling Patrick to brainstorm when the doorbell rings.

“Sir, do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior,” he hears someone say in a sing-song voice along with obnoxious knocking as he approaches the door.  Pete knows that fucking voice. “I’m here to save your soul,” the voice continues in a normal tone, before adding in its best demonic impression, “Because you’re going to Hell.”

“What the shit, Gabe,” Pete says prying the door open. Gabe is standing on his doorstep, holding up a neatly pressed miniature Bible with both hands. William and Travie are behind him, William’s elbow on Travie’s shoulder, and Travie’s arm around William’s waist, both looking more like a travelling porn circus than Jehovah Witnesses. “Where the fuck did you three get a Bible?”

“Some Bible ranting idiot was handing them out in the park down the road from your house,” Gabe says with a shrug. “He wants to cleanse our souls.”

“I see you’ve met the neighborhood psychopath. I’ve stolen that asshole’s Trump sign like eight times and burned it,” he said, ushering the three of them into his house. “Man, it’s good to see you fuckers,” he said, pulling each of them into a half hug. He herds them into his kitchen, and starts a pot of coffee.

He hadn’t thought to call the three of them for help, but since they know what really happened that night and they’re here it’s the perfect opportunity. After a few minutes of the three of them saying nothing, though, it starts to freak Pete out. Anyone who’s known Gabe longer than five minutes _knows_ Gabe never shuts up. He’s worse than Brendon, who actually _has_ ADHD, was at 17 when Pete first met him and the kid moved so fast Pete was half convinced he actually had a teleporter hidden away in his too-tight skinny jeans. Gabe has no excuse. He just likes the sound of his own voice. It’s amazing he found not just one person to put up with his crazy antics, but _two._ Silence is always unsettling when Gabe is involved.  “What really brings you here?” Pete asks as he passes each of them a cup of coffee. “And don’t say Jesus.”

Gabe huffs in laugher, before the mirth slips from his face, replaced with a frown and creased eyes. He shares a look with Travie and William before saying, “We need to talk about our Panic problem.”

“You mean Brendon and Spencer,” Pete says, matching Gabe’s frown. He abandons his coffee, and hops onto the island the other three are sitting around. He wouldn’t exactly call it a problem, per say. A problem, in his mind, would be if they never finished the album. A red fucking flag would be if they never started it at all, so at least there’s that. It’s just … slightly worrisome no one outside of the people necessary to finish the album have heard from them in months. He doesn’t even think they’ve spoken to Zack. “They’re avoiding you, too, huh?”

“Yeah,” Gabe nods, and clasps his hands to rest his chin on. “Did you know Ryan broke into their house a couple days ago?”

“Shit, really?” Pete says, and leans his weight back on his hands, swinging his feet against the island. “How the fuck do you know this?”

“I have a contact at TMZ.”

Pete jerks forward and stiffens. “They’re not …   ”

“Outing Spencer and Brendon? No,” Travie says. “They intended to use the 911 call that was made from their home to out them, but since neither is identified by name on the tape, they decided it wasn’t definitive enough proof to go ahead with the story.”

“Thank fuck,” Pete says, and starts swinging his legs again, until it fully registers what Travie just said. “Wait, 911 call? Are they okay?”

Gabe shares another look with William and Travie, before Gabe says, “Don’t know. They won’t answer our calls.”

William grabs Gabe’s clenched hand, smoothes out the tension along the lines of his arm, before lacing their fingers together. “They’re not doing too good, are they?” William quietly asks.

Pete stills, let’s his feet dangle from the island instead of kicking it. “I don’t think so,” Pete admits. “You guys didn’t tell anyone about what happened did you?”

“We would never,” Gabe vehemently replies. “But I think there are a few people who can read between the lines and figured it out.”

“They’re worried,” William says. “We’re all worried.”

“Yeah,” Pete says, and leans his weight back on his hands again. “I was just trying to think of what to do.”

“We think we can help,” Gabe says, “But we need them to stop avoiding us.”

“So what? You want to do like an intervention of something?” Pete asks, scrunching up his face, because that doesn’t seem like a very good idea. “Like corner them in their house or drag them over to mine or something?”

“You never corner an injured, wild animal,” Travie says. “If we stage on intervention like that we risk them shutting down or freaking out.” He shares another look with William and Gabe before adding, “We were thinking something more subtle.”

“What did you have in mind?” Pete cautiously asks. Travie may be the sanity in their relationship, the responsible one that tempered Gabe and sometimes William’s craziness, the eye to their hurricane, but he learned early on in his friendship with Gabe to never trust a plan that Gabe was an integral part of.

“You’re throwing a New Year’s Eve party, yes? Think you can get the two of them there, and then give us somewhere private to talk?” Travie asks.

“Yeah, I think I can do that,” Pete says, and then stares hard at the three of them. “What exactly are you planning on doing if I get them there?”

“Just talk to them. Just me,” Travie says, holding his gaze.

“If I do this, I’m trusting the three of you not to break them further.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Travie assures, so confident in his statement it startles Pete.

“Fine,” he reluctantly agrees. “I’ll find a way to get them there, even if I have to kidnap them.”  

The three of them share a look again, the one that makes Pete think they’re telepathically communicating and leaving the rest of the world purposely out of the conversation. “You have to agree to stop fucking doing that, though. It’s fucking creepy. And don’t even protest,” he adds, when Gabe goes to open his big mouth. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

*

Pete calls Brendon and Spencer what feels like a dozen times in less than two hours. He will battle ram his car through their fucking front door if he has to in order to get a hold of them, but finally, finally Spencer answers.

“Hey,” Spencer says, soft and unsure. “Is … is something wrong?”

“No, I just wanted to talk and catch up. I haven’t heard from you fuckers in forever. You’re ignoring me.”

“We haven’t,” Spencer starts and then pauses. “Yeah.”

“How was your Christmas?” Pete asks, lying down on his couch, his phone pressed into his ear. He’s trying to ease into the conversation, but Spencer’s having none of it. 

“Fucking miserable,” Spencer grumbles. “Just get to the point, please Pete. I know you have some sort of bad news. Is … Is the label dropping us?”

“What? No,” Pete says. He wishes he could reach through the phone and shake Spencer. But he knows what it’s like to think the worst of everything, to expect a nuclear bomb to drop right in the middle of his life even though everything was going well, so he understands why Spencer immediately assumes the worst. Doesn’t mean he has to like it. He takes a deep breath before saying, “No, of course not.  I’m really just calling to see if you’re coming to my New Year’s Eve Party.”

“Oh,” Spencer says, and he can’t make out the tone. “I really don’t think either of us are in the mood. Sorry,” he adds almost as an afterthought.

“Look, I know Ryan broke into your home the other day, and I’m fucking pissed you didn’t tell me,” Pete says. He’s trying to be delicate, okay? But he’s a dude, and he’s never really mastered the art of gently handling other people’s feelings instead of trampling all over them. “But when has Brendon, or you for that matter, ever turned down the chance to party? Does that sound like either of you at all?” he says, his voice rising in speed and volume at the end. “You know how fucking scary that is, right?”

The only response he gets is a slight shuffling on the other end of the phone, like the rustle of cloth.

Pete takes another deep breath to settle himself. “Spencer,” he says. “I … you and Brendon are on a dark path right now. If you continue down this path, you’re not going to like who you become, and you’re not going to like the world you live in anymore. When that happens you’re going to make some pretty stupid decisions about whether or not life is really worth it, and whether or not you really want to keep fighting. Trust me, I know. I’ve been there. I haven’t been exactly where you guys are, but I’ve been there, and if I didn’t have Patrick we wouldn’t be talking right now,” he admits, because he knows it’s harsh but this is something they need to hear.

“I know you don’t want to even leave the house right now, but you’re never going to want to, okay? Not until you force yourself out that door for the first time. And I know how hard it is to just be happy when everything’s telling you not to. But you have to do it. You don’t really have a choice at this point, because you’re not going to like the alternative.”

It’s silent for a moment after his mini-rant, until he hears a soft, “Okay,” that sounds like Brendon and not Spencer.

“So I will see both of you at my party then? Or do I have to send Zack after you? I think you’ve hurt his feelings, dude, by not calling him.”

“Zack doesn’t have feelings,” definitely Brendon meekly jokes.

He hears more rustling of cloth over the phone, then two muffled voices indiscernibly talking. “We’ll be there,” Spencer finally says.

“Good,” he huffs. “Come early. Travie wants to talk to you,” he adds so they don’t just throw them into the mosh pit with no warning when they both arrive.

He doesn’t give them a chance to ask about what before he hangs up.

*

“I swear to god if you scare them away I’ll lock all three of you in my basement without food and water, and only a broken yo-yo for entertainment,” Pete says, staring down William, Gabe, and Travie.  He may be only 5’6’’ to all three of their 6 feet plus, but he will rip them a new one if his protégés leave in worse shape than they showed up.

“It’s going to be fine,” Travie reassures.

“Travie’s like so awesome,” Gabe says, sidling up to Travie, and placing a big, wet kiss on his check. Travie rolls his eyes at Gabe’s antics. “So awesome.”

“Fucker, are you drunk already? Give me that,” Pete says, snatching the bottle of rum from Gabe. The Latino meekly protests, but gives up quickly and snuggles into Travie’s side instead. William, not wanting to be left out, snuggles into Travie’s other side. Pete has no fucking clue how Travie puts up with either of them.

“I swear to God, Gabe, I will stab you with a rusty spoon, and – ”

The doorbell rings.

_Oh God, they’re fucking here_ , he thinks. Does he go to the door to let them in? What is he supposed to do? He settles on answering the door like a fucking normal person, but instead he hears himself shouting, “Come in.” He definitely hadn’t intended on doing that.

When they walk in the room, he tries to act normal, whatever normal for him is, but instead he ends up resting his weight on one hand pushed flat against the wall, hip cocked out, and his other hand resting on his hip like he’s a wannabe James Dean. _Real smooth, you idiot,_ he thinks.

There’s a deliberate space between Brendon and Spencer, but they both reach for each other when four sets of eyes fall on them, pinkies touching briefly before pulling away.

It’s a stand-off. Pete flounders for something to say, but his brain that can literally do improv poetry at the drop of a hat, comes up with nothing, but static. None of the three-headed monster say anything either, and Pete wishes he was close enough to kick one of them (most likely Gabe) in the back of the knees, because this was their idea, and they’re making it awkward.

Finally, Brendon says, “Hey,” and gives a little wave. The corners of Spencer’s mouth briefly tilt upwards.

“About time you fuckers came over for a visit,” Pete says. He pushes off the wall and hugs Brendon first - who’s stiff in his arms but locks one arm around his lower back, squeezes, and lets go – and then attempts to hug Spencer, but he flinches, so Pete settles for clasping his hand and pulling him into a half hug.

“Yeah, sorry,” Spencer says, glancing at Brendon who won’t meet his gaze.

“You uh, you wanted to talk to us about something?” Brendon asks.

Travie steps forward and his two leeches reluctantly let go. “I want to talk to both of you separately, if that’s okay with you? Don’t be freaked out. It’s just a conversation, and we can talk about whatever you want. Okay?”

Spencer sends another questioning glance towards Brendon, who meets his eyes this time, lip caught between his teeth.

“Travie’s amazing,” William pipes up when Spencer and Brendon hesitate to agree.

“So awesome,” Gabe parrots.  The two are hanging off of each other, arms wrapped around one another, now that Travie has stepped away.

“In his hometown neighborhood, they called him Doctor T,” William says.

“Because he’s so good at talking to people,” Gabe adds.

Travie smiles fondly at the two of them, though neither can see it. “What Gabe and William are trying to say is I grew up in a tough neighborhood. I had a lot of friends in gangs. They knew I wasn’t part of that scene, so they’d come to me to just talk. Man, I’ve heard the craziest shit you can imagine, and seen the worst of humanity. And,” he says, leveling them both with a soft gaze, “I know what really happened that night. There’s nothing you can say that’ll shock or surprise me. I really think just talking about anything you want to will really help.”

“We’re not trying to corner you or pressure you into doing anything you don’t want to,” Gabe adds, sounding significantly more sober than he did just a minute ago.

“We just want to help,” William says. “And Travie is awesome.”

“So awesome,” Gabe parrots. “He gives me warm, fuzzy feelings in my –”

“Nope,” Pete says, slapping his hand over Gabe’s mouth. “No talk of your penis right now.” He jerks his hand away from Gabe when the fucker licks him, and wipes the dude’s own spit on Gabe’s shirt.

“It couldn’t hurt,” Brendon says, sharing another glance with Spencer. “I guess I’ll go first.”

“Got a place we can talk?” Travie asks, turning to Pete.

“Yeah, this way,” Pete says, leading the two of them to his kitchen. From the corner of his eye, he can see William and Gabe pounce on Spencer. He hopes they don’t traumatize him too much.

Pete leads them to a tiny room off his pantry. When he bought the house, he thought it was fucking weird that there was this little tiny room off of his pantry, of all places, that connected the main house to the garage. He mostly forgot about its existence, but Ashlee sometimes used it as a yoga room. He didn’t think she’d mind letting them use it now.

“In hear,” he says, and shuts the door behind them.  

But the door catches, and doesn’t quite close. The wood is too warped. He doesn’t think anyone, but him, will come into the pantry once people start showing up for the party, but he also doesn’t want to risk.

“I don’t know. This is weird, dude,” he can hear Brendon say. Pete peaks through the crack in the door, sees Brendon pacing the room, chewing on his thumb nail. He glances around the pantry, trying to decide what to drag over in front of it that’ll hold the door closed, but won’t block the exit or shatter if either leaves the room.

“Brendon, whatever you say never leaves this room. I will never repeat anything you say, not even to William and Gabe.”

“You don’t want to know my secrets,” Brendon says, turning his back to Travie.

“There’s nothing you can say that will shock or disgust me,” Travie says. “I once had a guy straight up tell me he murdered someone in cold blood. And this was my face.” Through the crack, Pete sees Travie pull his best imitation of a stereotypical therapist, his face neutral, but showing the slightest hint of interest, chin resting on his fist, legs crossed, as he hums in agreement.

A short bark of mirthless laughter escapes Brendon. “I’m just,” he says, and takes the seat next to Travie, sitting gingerly on the edge, his leg bouncing uncontrollably. Travie sprawls out, long legs extended in front of him, arms dangling over the back of the lawn chair Pete had dragged into the room earlier, the picture of calm. “I’m just so ashamed,” Brendon says, shaking his head, crossing and uncrossing his legs, before jerking forward in his seat to rest his elbows on his knees. “I should have never stayed with him as long as I did. I should have never … I tried to leave him once before, you know, before the night Spencer basically dragged me away and said I wasn’t allowed to go back. I just couldn’t take it anymore, and I didn’t really care what would happen if I left.”

“What stopped you?”

Brendon laughs, that mirthless, hollow sound again. “John,” Brendon says, a fully body tremor working its way through his body. “He just gave me this look of disgust, you know. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that, and then he asked Ryan why he kept me around. I thought if I left, if I told people why I left, everyone would treat me like John did. I was afraid everyone would … ” he says, before burying his face in his hands.

“Afraid they’d what?” Travie gently prompts.

Brendon stiffens his back, and crosses his arms across his chest, radiating a bravado they all know isn’t real. “That everyone would tell me it was my fault,” he admits in a quiet voice that contradicts his stiff posture.

“No one is going to blame _you_ for being a survivor of domestic abuse,” Travie says. "It is _not_ your fault."

“That’s what Spencer says,” Brendon says.

Travie decides not to press _that_ issue at the moment, choosing to say instead. “Was that the only reason you stayed?”

“No,” Brendon says, and shakes his head again. His elbows fall to his knees again, and he restlessly taps his feet and clenches and unclenches his hands. “Ryan got … He got really, high. He started crying and babbling. He asked me to stay, so I did. I always sort of knew something bad had happened to Ryan, you know, to make him that way. I thought I was, I don’t know, helping him by staying.” Brendon taps out a rhythm on the hard linoleum floor with his shoes, crossing his arms again, and leaning back in his seat. He huffs a laugh and says, “Maybe I had Stockholm Syndrome.”

“Why do you say that like it’s a joke?” Travie prompts.

“Don’t you have to be like kidnapped to have Stockholm Syndrome,” Brendon says with a wry smile, one that twists his features into something ugly.

“Or forced into a situation against your will. Brendon,” Travie says, and it’s his turn to lean forward, eyes boring into Brendon who glances up at him briefly, before staring down at his shoes. “How long did you stay with Ryan even though you didn’t want to?”

“A year,” Brendon quietly admits. He’s not so much crossing his arms across his chest anymore as he is curling in on himself.

“And how many times did he hit you even though you didn’t want him to? How many times did he force himself on you? How many times did he blame you, tell you it was your fault, even though it’s not?”

Pete watches, nauseous, as Brendon turns his head to face the opposite wall, his eyes clenched shut.

Brendon shrugs in response then says, “You want to know the real fucked up thing about it all? Sometimes I still wonder if he’s going to be okay.”

Travie lays a hand on Brendon’s shoulder, prompting the younger man to look at him. “It’s not your responsibility to fix him, Brendon.”

As quietly as he can manage, Pete shoves a case of Ashlee’s nasty protein shake drinks in front of the warped door, silencing the voices within.

*

It’s clear Brendon and Spencer have not spent a  lot of time away from each other in a while. Spencer looks like a little lost kitten wandering aimlessly through the streets, wet, and cold, and starved for nutrition. Together with William and Gabe, they distract him with music, fucking around in Pete’s music room with Spencer checking the clock every five minutes, until the first guests start to arrive. They head out into the living room, Gabe and William effectively taking over Spencer-wrangling as Pete attends to his new guests. Every time the doorbell rings, they all pretend not to notice the way Spencer jumps.

“I’m going to go get snacks for everyone,” Ashlee says as the first guests start to settle in.

“I’ll do it,” he says, jumping up from his seat. He never told Ashlee about what he knows of that night, and he wants to protect his friends’ privacy as much as possible.

When he passes the tiny half bathroom just off of his kitchen, though, Brendon is standing at the sink, splashing cold water on his face, and rubbing his red eyes.

“You okay?” Pete asks, leaning his shoulder against the door frame.

“I’m –” Brendon says, and then thinks better of it. He shrugs instead.

“Hey,” he says. “No one expects you to be fine. It’s okay if you’re not. Just as long as you keep trying to get there.”

“Yeah, I know,” Brendon says, his shoulders sagging. “I’ll try.”

“Good,” he says, and they fall silent, Brendon shuffling from foot to foot, and Pete is just. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

“Travie wanted to …” Brendon says, gesturing out the door.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry,” Pete says, and steps out of Brendon’s way.

"Pete," Brendon says, as he brushes by him. "Thanks."

"Of course, dude," Pete says, awkwardly punching him in the shoulder.

Forgetting his original task, he follows Brendon into the living. He sees Brendon meet Spencer’s gaze from across the room, and jerk his head in the direction of the kitchen. Spencer nods in response, disentangling Gabe’s arm from around his shoulder. He touches Brendon’s shoulder as he passes.

Pete feels like he’s missing something.

“I thought you were getting snacks?” Ashlee teases.

“I did,” Pete says, grabbing Brendon by the elbow and yanking the younger man in front of him. “Have at him, ladies,” he says, and pushes Brendon hard on his back so he stumbles towards Ashlee, her sister, Jessica, and a few other women gathered around his wife.

Brendon’s eyes widen comically. “What? Pete, no,” he says, as the women enfold him in their clutches.

Pete cackles as he waltzes out of the room on his way back to the kitchen. He hesitates at the pantry door. He’s already heard too much, intruded too much on what are supposed to be private conversations with Travie. If he comes back empty handed again, though, he knows Ashlee will march right in here, and he cannot let that happen.

 He inches into the pantry, left hand resting on the old oak door to keep it from squeaking.

“I told my parents,” he hears Spencer say. It’s an automatic reaction to look up and peak through the crack in the door. Spencer is as restless as Brendon, but his pacing is more focused and less erratic. “I told them about what Ryan did to me as a teen. I didn’t exactly do in the most tactful way.” He stops pacing and leans his weight against the wall, one foot flat against the purple wall paper. “I went back a few days later to talk to them about it after we both cooled down, and … ” Spencer drops his arms to his sides, clenches his hands, before crossing his arms again. “It didn’t go well. I told my mom Ryan was disturbed, had always been. She just zeroed in on that, you know? She just kept saying things like she couldn’t believe she didn’t notice Ryan needed help, and if she’d known she could have gotten him help sooner. I just told my mother I was raped by the same person who raped my boyfriend who knows how many times and she’s more worried about the guy that did it than us. Like I know it must be hard to hear something like that, but she could at least act like she cared about me,” he said, shaking his head.

“What happened next?” Travie prompted when Spencer fell silent for a few moments.

“I was about to go off of on her again. I’m just so mad, you know? I’m not like Brendon. He’s just like accepted it or something, but I haven’t. I can’t. But right before I started yelling again, my father hugged me. He was … he was crying. He said he was really sorry that that happened to me, that he was sorry he never noticed that it happened and that he never noticed how uncomfortable being around Ryan I was after. Then he,” Spencer says, his voice breaking. “He said he was really proud of me for being brave enough to tell them, and he was proud of all that I had accomplished despite what happened, that I preserved, or some bullshit, and kept going.”

“Why do you think that’s bullshit?”

“Because I don’t think I’m handling it as well as he thinks I am. And Brendon’s he’s … he’s getting worse, I think, and I don’t know how to help him, and we’re both … I don’t like where we’re headed. If we don’t pull ourselves out of this funk soon … I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

“I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit,” Travie says.

“You think I’m being too hard on myself?” Spencer says.

“You tell me,” Travie says.

“I just,” Spencer says, dropping his arms and pushing off the wall. He finally approaches Travie, and sits in the chair next to him. “I just wish I’d never met Ryan. I wish we didn’t owe him.”

“Owe him?” Travie asks, and it’s the most emotion he’s adopted all night from what Pete has heard. It’s equal parts sass and disbelief.

“Yeah,” Spencer says, eyeing Travie warily. “For Panic. For all this,” he says, waving his arm around the room to encompass, well, everything.  

“You don’t owe Ryan anything,” Travie says.

“But –”

“Nothing,” Travie insists. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Spencer says, eyes widened in surprise at Travie. But just like Brendon, he also doesn’t look entirely convinced.

Pete toes the case of protein shakes in front of the door until Spencer’s voice fades away completely.

*

"How do you do it?" Pete asks Travie after the party had died down, and mostly everyone had crashed or gone home. "How did you get them to open up like that?"

"I just listened," Travie says with a shrug. "And when they stop talking, I just prompt them to keep going." 

"That's it?"

"That's it," Travie says. "Sometimes all people want is just someone to listen to them." 


End file.
